


In the Timeless Dark of the Wald

by mitspeiler



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Awesome, Fairies, Giants, Heroes, Mermaids, Metafiction, Monsters, Multi, Ogres, Red Ettins, Revisionist Fairy Tale, Sirens, Trolls, Vampires, Walt Disney - Freeform, monster-hunters, puppeteer-spiders, right-valiant Cornish men, the Fair Folk, wish-granting gold fish
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2015-02-09
Packaged: 2017-12-22 10:09:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/911977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitspeiler/pseuds/mitspeiler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Various collectors of fairy tales wind up in a dark forest together and tell stories to pass the time.  A certain famous film-maker proposes a contest, arguments ensue, stories are stolen, and certain people are not invited to attend but show up anyway.  Starts off with Kankri and Karkat telling their own version of Snow White and it spirals out of control from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. How Offensive of You

_In the timeless dark of the Wald, the primeval forest that surrounds human consciousness, two brothers sit around a campfire, one in red and one in grey.  The grey one is Karkat Grimm, famed linguist and anthropologist.  His face carries a permanent scowl, but he is fact quite personable compared to his older brother, Kankri, who is likewise an expert in both of those fields.  The expression on his face is one of pious sanctimony.  He is very difficult to talk to, a fact which belies his incomparable skill in writing.  Some years ago the two embarked on a journey to collect the native folklore of their country and compiled an enormous reference book.  For some reason, this was insanely popular with the children, and as such Kankri set out to ‘improve’ it by making it more suitable for young audiences.  His brother doesn’t begrudge him too much, of course, because although he compromised the anthropological integrity of the work, Kankri certainly made it easier to read, and made them a great deal of money besides.  It was perhaps not Karkat’s best idea to transcribe, word-for-word, the stories that they’d heard from uneducated peasants.  It had gone from something like:_

 

            uH, oNCE uPON a tIME,, i tHINK tHAT’S hOW iT gOES,, tHERE wAS a lITTLE gIRL ,,, wHO wAS rEALLY,,, rEALLY pRETTY.  aCTUALLY, sHE wAS a pRINCESS nOW I tHINK aBOUT iT.  aND sHE hAD a bALL,,, tHAT ,, wAS mADE oF gOLD.  iT wAS vERY eXPENSIVE, bUT bEING a pRINCESS, sHE pLAYED wITH iT a lOT. aND oNE dAY, iT fELL dOWN a wELL….

 

            _To something more like:_

 

            Once upon a time, there was a young princess who had the exquisite beauty of roses.  Something of a loner, her favorite toy was a golden ball, inscribed with the sun.  One day she went exploring to a well outside the castle grounds that was ancient and thick with moss.  Here she played with her ball, but to her dismay, it slipped from her hands and fell in, leaving nothing but a shimmering trail of bubbles in the water.

            _And so on.  At the moment, the brothers were questing for some new tales to transcribe, when who should come across them but Feferi Perrault, that grandee from the French court who had penned_ the Tales of Mother Goose _.  Nevermind that she had been dead for a few centuries by the time the Grimms were compiling their collection.  Time has no meaning in the Wald.  Dressed in a long elegant gown sewn with pearls, with a stiff, fan-like color and voluminous sleeves, she looked like a princess herself._

_“Oh yay!” she said, hugging Karkat with gusto.  “It’s been so long you guys!”_

_“Piss off,” said Karkat, pushing her away.  “We never met.  Also, you set back the field by like three hundred years, for shame.”_

_She giggled and sat down on a convenient log.  “What are you even talking about?”_

_“Your book,” he snapped.  “People today are always going on about how fairy tales are filling kids’ minds with nonsense and teaching girls to be subservient and all that bullshit.  If they’re retarded, they blame poor Gam Disney, who just wants to be an entertainer, and if they have a spoonful of spongy matter in their think-pans they blame us, but no one ever blames_ you _, even though you’re the only one who actually did any of that!” he stood up.  “Or in your own language, ‘j’accuse!”  He pointed his finger, accusing._

_“Wow, okay,” said Feferi in a light tone, “but I didn’t write that book for children!  It was just a bunch of stories that I wrote for my friends at the café, and then I decided to publish it.”_

_“That is understandable,” said Kankri, speaking for the first time, “but those morals you inserted at the end were completely irresponsible, not only in the literary sense but in a moral one.  It is highly inappropriate to tell young girls that they should be grateful to get married at the end of a story called ‘Beauty and the Beast.’  Especially since it completely contradicts the information present in the story, which is that kindness is the best measure of a person’s worth as opposed to physical beauty or intelligence.”  Finished, he commenced eating from his can of beans._

_“Doesn’t he usually go on for longer?” Feferi asked._

_“Yeah, but he doesn’t actually give a shit about women’s rights so you got off easy,” Karkat explained._

_“Okay,” said Feferi, “maybe the morals weren’t the best idea.  Honestly I just wanted to end on a poem every time, and the only ones I could come up with were morals!  But you have to admit, I’m a better writer than you guys,” she taunted with a wink._

_Kankri dropped his can of beans.  “Oh Hell no.”_

_With a big toothy smile, she simply said, “Oh yes.”_

_“Your overly verbose flowery language is no match for our clear, poetic prose!” he snapped._

_“Don’t look at me,” said Karkat, “I’m the one who thought word-for-word transcription would be a good idea.”_

_“Did somebody say John Jacobs?!” said John Jacobs, Victorian gentleman and anthologist.  Karkat could swear he heard a comedic piano sting playing somewhere.  He was something of a hybrid of the Grimms and Perrault in that he did set out to make a fundamentally English collection of fairy tales, but he only did it for fun.  Despite his formal suit, a tailcoat the color of the summer sky, he gave off the aura of a trickster._

_“Get out of here asshole,” said Karkat.  “Maybe Feferi did a lot of bullshit,” he said, pointing his thumb at the girl (she waved cheerfully), “but she never straight up made shit up like you did!  ‘Rushen Coatie’?  More like….stupid!”_

_John chuckled.  “In my defense, I said right there in the introduction that there were already over three thousand variations of Cinderella, and that I made up my own version to see if some years down the line, people would be telling it to each other thinking it was ‘real’.  What does that even mean, anyway?”  He too sat down on a convenient log and warmed his hands over the fire._

_“Yeah, it’s a party now!” said Feferi, high-fiving John._

_Karkat groaned a loud, pained groan from deep inside his soul.  “Fine, as long as that depressing goddamned broad doesn’t show—”_

_“You rang?” said Rose Andersen, stepping in out of the shadows, lilac eyes glowing in the firelight, and Karkat screamed._

_“No,” he said, “Hell no, this fire is for anthropologists and linguists, serious scientific people with serious things to say about their fields.  You,” he shouted, “are a glorified short-story writer who got lucky!  How many short story writers can most people even name?  There’s O. Henry and there’s you and O. Henry didn’t pretend to write fairy tales!”_

_“Hi Rose,” said John, ignoring Karkat.  “Sit down by the fire.  We’re going to have a story-telling contest!”_

_“That sounds delightful,” she said, sitting down next to him.  “What are the terms?”_

_John opened his mouth, then frowned, thinking._

_“How’s about I motherfuckin’ preside over this little contest?” came a drawling voice, cadences rising high and low with levity._

_Gam Disney himself stepped in out of the dark in a purple pin-striped suit and a Mickey Mouse pin on his lapel.  He handed out several identical pins to the party, and they were pleased.  “I think we should start with my first motherfuckin’ movie.  ‘Snow White’.  Now that story’s got everything.  Chases, escapes, dwarves, miracles, true motherfuckin’ love—”_

_“Stop quoting_ the Princess Bride _,” Karkat said, sounding very tired, “you had nothing to do with that!”_

_Gamzee pulled out his cell phone and sent off a text message.  “Well now I own the motherfuckin’ rights to it bro, so it’ll be no problem at all!  And wouldn’t it be better as a musical?” The way he said it, it sounded as if he actually thought Karkat had cared about that._

_Karkat opened his mouth to complain, but stopped himself.  “Well, if it was you specifically doing it, or your company during the nineties…this is dumb!  Let’s just tell the fucking the story!”  He pointed at Feferi again.  “You’re the oldest one here—”_

_She flushed angrily, “no need to point it out—”_

_“So you tell your dumbass version of ‘Snow White’!”_

_“I never did ‘Snow White’!” she moaned._

_“You must have!” Karkat insisted.  “Because our version didn’t have a kiss but somehow that’s entered the public consciousness.  Waking a princess with a kiss is such a French thing to do and waking her with ….”  The bushes nearby rustled as if housing something just bursting to come out into the light.  “I’m not summoning_ him _.  If_ he _shows up it’s not my fault!”_

_“But I never did ‘Snow White’!” Feferi snapped, baring her teeth.  John and Rose scooted back a bit on their log.  “I did Little Redcap, I did ‘Puss in Boots’, I did ‘Bluebeard’—”_

_Kankri snorted.  “I thought that drivel was one of Karkat’s!”_

_Karkat snorted.  “Fuck you, ‘Furrypelts’—”_

_“_ Allerleighraugh _,” said Kankri.  “The title can only be meaningfully conveyed in its native German—”_

_“Don’t you mean Catskin?” said Feferi helpfully.  “I love that one!  Of course, it starts off pretty icky so I had to change it.”_

_“What’s wrong with it?” asked Rose, curious._

_Feferi leaned in conspiratorially and, blushing slightly, mouthed ‘incest’._

_“Hey,” said John, “I’ve got to say, I love all of our stories, and I already know which ones are my favorites.  So, let’s try something new!”  He pointed from Karkat to Kankri and back; the two of them looked at him disdainfully.  “You guys are great because you’re_ scientists _.  Stories are like living things and you caught them and dissected them and put them in jars for people to look at with all the parts labeled and stuff.  So, I think you should start us off with some lesser known version of Snow White.  Something weird and sexy that you had to get rid of after the second or third edition.  That would be awesome!”_

_Karkat rolled his eyes.  “There’s not that much variation in this story, it’s all the same shit…” he paused.  “Well, there’s that one version.”_

_He and Kankri looked at each other.  Kankri nodded.  He pulled out a flute and began to play.  Karkat began to recite his tale, voice low and strong, Old High German carrying across the Wald like an eerie breeze._

Sneewittchen

            Count Jake and his lovely countess Jane were taking in the winter air in their carriage.  It was crisp and cold, and the ground with thick with crystalline white snow.  “Why Jake?” Jane asked.  “Why did we have to go out in the middle of winter?”

            Jake snorted.  “Think of the fascinating people we might meet on the road!  Everybody and their grandmother is out during the spring and the summer, and only boring people and young couples go out in the autumn.  But anyone we might meet right now, well they’ve got to be up to something interesting!”

            Jane scoffed.  “Haven’t you ever heard the curse, ‘may you live in interesting times’?”

            Jake laughed long and hard at that one.  “In what way could that possibly constitute a curse?  And who do I have to offend to get it cast against me?”  Somewhere off in the distance, a wolf howled.

            “We should turn back,” Jane said.  “The only people likely to be out here are bandits preying on stupid counts and their stupider wives!”

            “Fortunately for me I have a clever wife,” said Jake.

            “How smart can I be?” she groaned.  “I married _you_.”

            He gave her a pistol and a wink.  “Exactly.”

            For a long time, nothing happened.  The wind picked up, and howled through the trees, joining the distant day-howling of the wolves.  The sky was blank and white, and gave no indication of the time.  A huge mound of snow had developed at the base of a certain tree, bigger than a person.  Jake chuckled.  “What if we met someone as white as that snow?”

            For some reason the thought sent shivers up Jane’s spine.

            They drove on in silence, the only sound coming from the snorting of the horses, puffing clouds of steam from their nostrils.  Suddenly, an unkindness of ravens thundered down from the heavens, croaking and cawing, empty black eyes flashing in the winter light.  They swarmed around something behind a bush, its branches so thick that Jane couldn’t see through it, and quite thankfully, because the sounds coming from it now were those of frenzy.  “Hah!” said Jake.  “Someone as black as an unkindness of ravens!”

            “Shut up Jake,” Jane muttered, keeping her voice low so he couldn’t hear it wavering.

            Eventually, they came to a sight that made Jake stop the horses in appreciation, and made Jane stifle a scream.  Right next to the road were three long, deep ditches full of blood, the exact length and breadth, in fact, of a coffin.  “Why is this here!?” Jane shouted.

            “I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Jake, sounding a bit excited.  Within a second, one of his flintlocks was in hand, a beautiful piece with a silver wolfshead on the butt.  “Like as not, local hunters use it to drain the blood from their kills.  But still one wonders….”

            “Don’t say it,” Jane squeaked.

            “What if…” Jake continued, a devilish grin on his face.

            “Please don’t Jake,” his wife muttered.

            “We met someone…”

            “I’ll leave you,” Jane threatened.  “I could have married the prince of France but I picked you.  He’s still single, last I heard!”

            With a big smile, Jake said, “alright.  I won’t say it.”  He flicked the reins and the horses took off again, this time at a steady trot.  Jane couldn’t help but think of what might be behind them.  Dared she turn and watch?  If she didn’t they wouldn’t see the attack coming, but she suddenly got the idea that if she took her eyes off Jake, when she turned back to look at him he wouldn’t be there anymore.  It was stupid and childish, but there it was, the sudden gripping paranoia that the man she loved could be taken from her without her knowledge.  It took hold of her heart, and never let go until the day she died.

            Minutes later, Jake eased up on the horses, content that there was no danger about and holstered his pistol.  The silence returned.  There was nothing but the rocking of the carriage, the creaking of the wheels, the crunch of snow under the horses’ heavy hooves, and the occasional suspiration out of Jane’s relieved mouth, when suddenly Jake turned and shouted “But what if we met someone as green as these emeralds?!”

            Jane shouted and almost jumped from the carriage, then came to her senses and simply smacked Jake full across the face.  He just laughed and pushed his hand towards her again.  In his palm was an emerald necklace set in silver; the mounting was patterned with tiny snowflakes.  Jane sighed and put it on.  “Was this all just an excuse to give me a present?”

            “That’s a distinct possibility dear,” he said with another wink.   She wrapped her arms around him and gave him a warm kiss on the cheek.  “I love you, you stupid, stupid man,” she said.

            They turned the corner round another mound of snow, and Jane’s heart stopped.  There was a figure dressed in the red of blood, whose skin was paler than the snow.  Her black hair, gently curled and cut daringly short, and her soft, pouty lips, pursed like a lover’s, were as black as an unkindness of ravens.  Her eyes sparkled like emeralds.  Jake stopped, smiling like the sun.  “Good day, lady!  You look terribly cold.  Would you like a ride?”

 

            _“I don’t think I like this story,” said Feferi._

_“Shut up, this is going to be amazing,” said John, munching on a bag of popcorn.  “Just you wait….”_

 

            Her name was Kanaya, apparently.  That was all she said.  As to where she came from and where she was going there wasn’t a single word, or why she would be wearing such a light outfit in the bitter cold.  But Jake kept turning to talk to her, for all that she didn’t respond, and she would look at him, eyes bright and hungry.  Jane hated her instantly.

            Jake drove on, but having been so easily distracted, he drove deeper and deeper into the dark wood.  The black trees with their snow-laden branches bent towards them like gripping claws, the knotted bark seeming like scowling faces.  “Jake,” Jane said authoritatively, “we are lost!”

            “Let’s not fight in front of our guest,” he muttered, flushing slightly.

            Something snapped inside of Jane and she began devising a plan, she who had never been one for plots and schemes, at least not the hatching of them.  But perhaps years of untangling webs had given her the talent to weave them?  She pointed out into the woods.  “We are _lost_ Jake.  Go find a tree taller than the rest, climb it, and find the right path, now!”  Jake sighed and dismounted.  “And give me a gun,” she said, holding out her hand.  “You don’t want to leave a pair of defenseless ladies alone in the wood, do you?”

            Though it clearly pained him to give up one of his weapons, he complied readily, and, drawing the other pistol, hurried off into the woods.  He was soon out of sight.

            Jane felt Kanaya’s eyes boring into her like awls.  She turned and looked at the beautiful girl with disdain, feeling the weight of the gun in her hands.  She readied the hammer—

            And she yawned luxuriantly, covering her mouth with a gloved hand.  As she did so, she muttered a spell into the fabric.  She was no witch, but in those days there was magic everywhere in the world, regular old folk magic that people could do every day.  And her glove jerked itself up and away, out of the carriage and into the snow.  Smiling sweetly, Jane said, “Could you get that for me, Kanaya?”

            The blank look on the girl’s doll-like face disconcerted her.  Jane wondered if perhaps she wasn’t as smart as she thought, but then Kanaya nodded and slid from the carriage, looking for the white glove amidst the snow.  As soon as she did, disconcertingly quickly, it fluttered up into the air as if caught by a high wind.  Gait steady and strong, like a huntress, Kanaya stalked after it.  She left no tracks in the snow.  Soon, her crimson dress had disappeared from sight.

            Jake returned a few minutes after that.  ‘Where’s Kanaya?” he asked distressed sounding.  “I fear for her safety.  She seems so innocent.”

            “Some relatives of hers came by,” said Jane, “they took her home.  She’s a bit mad, the poor dear, can’t really take care of herself.  I gave her my gloves as a parting gift.”  She was surprised at how easily the lies were coming to her now.  Perhaps she could get used to it.

            Jake sighed deeply, looking disappointed.  “I wish they’d stuck around a moment, to say goodbye.”  With a last wistful look at the woods, he flicked the reins and they were off.

 

            _“And so it ends,” said Karkat._

_John stopped, popcorn halfway to his mouth.  “Huh?”_

_“That was what we call a fragment,” said Kankri.  “A piece of a story we collected because either our interviewee couldn’t remember or because it turns into another story half-way through.  Consider it an alternate beginning to ‘Snow White’ proper.”_

_“Wow, I’m sorry,” said John, “But this is a story-telling contest.  You have to actually finish telling your story!”  He stood up and dusted corn fragments off his suit.  “Fuck it, I’ll finish it for you….”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cliffhanger, mmm. The Thief of Prospit chapter is like, 60% done, calm yourselves.  
> This series is going to go like this; everyone’s going to tell a story, but more people are going to drop by. This’ll get pretty metatextual soon, if it hasn’t already, with people stealing each other’s stories and making comparisons to other stories and suchlike, and whoever the fuck is hiding in the bushes and why they don’t want him there. Feel free to suggest a tale you think needs Homestuckification! They won’t have continuity with each other, so Kanaya isn’t locked into her current role. Think of the characters as actors. Since all of my other vanity projects seemed to be the most popular ones, I will declare this just that right now, a vanity project. No one will give a shit about this except me, so as to avoid the fate of Trollish Layer, languishing in obscurity.


	2. Canon Welding

_John walked around the campfire.  His story-telling was not the overly formal bardic tradition the Grimms had employed.  John talked with his hands and his body, trying to keep the natural rhythm of normal speech rather than keeping time with music.  He did voices for all the characters, mostly silly, but with hints of menace where necessary.  It was really the difference between attending an orchestra and watching a movie.  “As soon as the count and countess returned to their palace,” he began…._

 

Snow White

            She was there, standing on the steps before the great door when they arrived, holding a mangled glove in one hand.  Her emerald eyes found Jane and bored into her like drills.  Jane thought she could die happily if she could just put them out. 

            Jake however, was thrilled.  “Kanaya!  How did you get here so quickly?” he said, rushing towards her from the carriage.  “No matter!  Come inside, we shall have a feast in your honor.”

            “Yes,” she said.  Her words were like glass in a bucket of ice water to Jane’s ears.  She should have done something.  She should have forbidden it, but something stayed her tongue.  Who was this girl, really?  And why should Jane hate her?  Jake was just fascinated by new people is all.  He didn’t mean anything by it.  Right?

            The feast was had, and everyone seemed enchanted by Kanaya’s beauty, though in the warm candle-light her complexion made her seem more ill than fair.  At least Jane thought so.  Kanaya hardly ate; in fact she might not have eaten anything at all.  Jane wasn’t going to watch her that closely, she had standards dammit.  The pale girl danced with whoever asked her, and though she never sought out company, this meant she was on her feet most of the night.  The girl moved with the same grace as she’d shown while hunting for Jane’s glove; the lithe grace of a huntress.   To Jane’s relief, Jake only danced with her once.

            And then, at some point, the girl disappeared.  Jake was saddened, but he said, “I suppose all good things must come to an end, eh love?” and kissed Jane on the cheek.  “I suppose so,” she agreed, a smile playing on her lips.  The night wore down, and Jane and Jake retired to bed, exhausted by the festivities. 

            Something woke her in the night.  Not a sound or even a sensation.  Something had triggered Jane’s oft-ignored sense for people.  There were far too many in the immediate vicinity.  Awake, but eyes closed, she listened hard for any sign of danger.  There was no sound.  Not the slightest tapping of a bare white foot or rustle of crimson silk, but she could feel that the extra person in the room had moved directly in front of her.  She could feel emerald drills again, penetrating her, knowing her heart and mind in ways she herself could not possibly understand.  There was a moment of awareness.  She thought she had known what her role in this story would be.  She thought, in her heart of hearts, she had started going down a path of darkness.  That she was destined to be the wicked one.  But as she opened her eyes a realization hit her.  And was immediately forgotten.

            Those sparkling emeralds were beautiful.  It seemed as if the warmth of the castle had finally found its way into Kanaya’s body, as she was flushed with it all over.  She seemed softer now, warmer, more beautiful than ever.  She extended a hand, and, mesmerized, Jane took it.  Kanaya led her out into the hall.  It was colder here, but not by much.  “You seem different,” Jane breathed.

            “I have eaten well,” Kanaya said with a slight smile, “and I will do so again.”  She spoke very carefully, as if words were unfamiliar to her.  She leaned forward and kissed Jane on the neck.  Jane allowed it, feeling true bliss for the three seconds before Kanaya bit down on her jugular and drained the blood from her body.  Jane’s realization bubbled back up to the surface as her final thought.  Her daughter was not even two years old.  She would be an absent mother.

 

            _“Motherglubber!” shouted Feferi, throwing her shoe at John.  “You can’t end the story like that!”_

_John laughed as he dodged the jeweled slipper.  “Why not?” he asked, handing back the shoe.  She threw it at him again._

_“You made something up!” Karkat shouted._

_“I don’t like sad endings!”  Feferi moaned._

_“You turned our alternate beginning into a prequel?” said Kankri.  “Well, points for effort, but that really is quite facetious of you.  The girl in the snow was supposed to be, well, Snow White.”_

_John snorted.  “Creepy looking kid just standing there in the snow, doesn’t speak when spoken to, causes grown-ass adults to behave like lunatics?  I call that unnatural.  I call that a_ vampire _, sirs.  Besides,” he said, wiping his glasses, “I agree with you Feferi, sad endings_ are _terrible.  I was nowhere near finished.”_

A dark shadow hung over the castle from the night the countess was murdered.  Within a year, the count remarried, choosing the mysterious forest creature that had followed him home for his bride.  After a year of marital bliss, he too, died.  And people had disappearing for years now, people who lived in and around the forest.  They were occasionally found just as the countess had been, torn at the neck, and dry as a mummy, but often as not never seen again.  The people whispered that the palace was cursed, that a vampire stalked the halls.  Only two things kept them from leaving altogether; their beautiful countess, who could do no wrong, and the wonderful lady’s adopted daughter.  With hair black as ebony, eyes like emeralds, and skin as white as snow, they might have been mother and daughter in truth and not just in name.  They called her Little Snow White, but her real name was Jade.

            She sat curled up against the countess on her black throne, drooling into her crimson shoulder.  The room was dark and bare, decorated in iron and ebony to demonstrate the countess’s power.  Kanaya stroked her hair absently as the little girl purred away on her lap.  The poor thing had worn itself out playing today, the first snowfall of the year.  What was Kanaya to do?  Some semblance of normalcy was required of course, but she found that actually cared about the stupid little thing.  It was _adorable_.  Lionesses sometimes nursed gazelles in the wild, she knew, and the bond lasted their entire lives.  But soon Jade would grow up, and already the people were whispering that her beauty would outstrip Kanaya’s own.  With such a tempting morsel right there at her lap, Kanaya would be hard-pressed to ignore it.  Such blood would sustain her for decades to come.  And she would have no choice.

            Her hand wandered down the silky black hair to her adopted daughter’s neck.  She considered snapping it right now, making a clean break of it, metaphorically of course, and also literally.  Spare her the pain of being torn apart and eaten alive in a blood-frenzy.  Then she would scream and say that the child had fallen.  The people would believe anything of their beloved White Countess.  Instead she just rubbed the tender skin at Jade’s throat and sighed.  She didn’t _want_ to eat Jade; that was the problem.  Perhaps this was her punishment for being what she was.  Kanaya placed a kiss on the crown of Jade’s skull and held the little girl tight, wondering what to do next.

            The winter Jade turned twelve, and Kanaya noticed the unmistakable signs of adolescence, she nearly panicked.  The signs were so subtle that they couldn’t yet be seen, but the smell of her blood was rich with metamorphosis.  Kanaya avoided her daughter as much as she could, and did not dare touch, much less kiss her.  Finally, she had an idea.  It would be risky, but it was Jade’s only chance to survive.

           

            “Where are we going?” Jade asked.  They were in a part of the woods she’d never seen before.  The trees here were black and knotted, and their branches bent low with age like grasping claws.  But the spring had touched even this place, and the ground was thick with long grass and wildflowers, and the air hummed with bees.  A butterfly fluttered in the breeze.  It landed on her mother’s shoulder and fell down dead. “Oh no,” said Jade, picking it up.

            “Leave it there dear,” said Kanaya, “it was probably sick.  We’re going to pick some flowers.  Special flowers that live deeper in the forest.”  She picked up her pace.  The grass did not stay bent where she had tread, as if she had no weight at all.  “Stay close, and don’t get separated.”

            Jade tried, but her mother was moving faster and faster with every step.  Jade cried out for her to slow down, but Kanaya only got faster and soon she was out of sight.  Jade stopped.  Her mother left no tracks and never had.  Jade had never questioned it, but now it seemed very, very inconvenient.  “Mom!” she shouted.  “I got separated!”  Kanaya had very sharp hearing, she knew, and would be back shortly.

 

            A few hours later Jade was running through the woods in a blind panic.  Kanaya had been an ever-present guardian, there at a moment’s notice whenever Jade had needed her, and now she was gone and for the first time in her life Jade was truly afraid.  It was nearly dark now.  What would become of her, out here?

            Just as the sun had set, she found a godsend.  A little house nestled between two trees.  She pounded on the door, shouting for help, but none came.  Just as she’d given up hope, the door swung open, loosened by her pounding.  Inside were several beds, and Jade realized how tired she was.  She picked the nearest one and fell onto it face first, falling asleep instantly.

 

            Stained and besmottered with the blood of the vile forest creatures, the knights rode home, their mighty steeds kicking up a storm of dust.  There were seven of them.  The Red Knight with his darkened glasses, his brother the Winged Knight, identical but for his brilliant orange plumage, the Crab Knight, who wields a sickle, the only decoration on his drab grey armor a crucifix, the Laughing Knight who they say is as strong as the wind and carries a hammer, armor blue as the sky, the Rose Knight, a lovely young woman whose weapon is not a blade but her mind, armor aglow with her majjycks, the Cat Knight who shuns armor and wears the skins of animals into warfare, and the Princess Knight, exiled from her kingdom, who wields a trident. 

            They arrived at their shared hut just as the sunrise crested the forest, like a triumphant note in an anthem.  “WHO LEFT THE FUCKING DOOR OPEN!?” said the Crab Knight, glaring at the Laughing Knight.

            “I’m pretty sure I closed it when we left so that means there’s an intruder,” said the Red Knight, dismounting. 

            “That’s right I saw him do it.  He locked that door like a motherfucker,” said the Winged Knight.  He drew his sword and followed after his brother.

            “WHY ARE THERE TWO OF HIM?”  The Crab Knight groaned.

 

            “ _Stop imitating me,” said Karkat.  “I don’t shout like that all the time, asshole!”_

_John snickered.  “Who said I was imitating you?  The Crab Knight is just a Knight.  Who is Crabby.  And is named Karkat.”_

_“Why are they knights though?” asked Feferi.  “What’s wrong with dwarfs?”_

_“It’s pronounced dwarves,” said Kankri, pointing with two fingers, “and I’ll thank you to use the politically-correct term.  As to your question, the exact number and species of the hut-dwellers doesn’t matter.  We’ve collected a number of stories where the people in the house were fairies, trolls, coal miners, talking bears, anything at all.  The purpose of them is to provide Snow White with a place to stay, nothing more.  The tradition of knights coming to Snow White’s aide, however, was popularized by Russian national treasure, the poet and novelist—”_

_Karkat covered his brother’s mouth, looking around the clearing warily.  “We don’t need any other people coming in right now, do we?”  He looked at John.  “Finish up so someone else can have a turn eh?  This is taking forever.”_

_“Maybe if you’d stop interrupting him,” Rose scoffed._

            “False alarm,” shouted the Red Knight, “it’s just some little girl broke into our house and fell asleep on my bed.”  Jade was woken by the sound and froze up at the sight of two heavily armed men staring at her with swords drawn. 

            Calmly and slowly, she stood up and gave a polite bow.  “Is this your house?” she asked.  “I’m really sorry for breaking in, but I was lost in the woods and didn’t know what to do!  Can you please take me back to my mother?”

            By now the other Knights had entered the house and gathered around the newcomer.  The Laughing Knight stepped forward.  “Sure!  Just tell us who she is and where she lives, and I’ll take you back to her myself.”

            Jade beamed.  “My mother is the countess, Kanaya!”

            Their smiles melted from their faces, and with a gesture the Rose Knight shut and barred the door.  “So you’re her then?” she asked.  “Little Snow White?”

            Hesitantly, Jade answered, “that’s what they call me, but my name is Jade,” she trailed off.

            “You understand that creature isn’t your real mother?” Rose said.

            Jade frowned.  “I know my real parents died, but she’s the only mother I can remember.”

            The Laughing Knight knelt to look her in the eye and put his gauntleted hand on Jade’s shoulder.  “We’d been hunting that vampiress for ages before she crept her way into the safety of the palace.  I promise you Jade, getting lost in the woods is the best thing that ever happened to you.”

            Jane was stunned.  “Huh?”

 

            It took some convincing, but eventually Jade understood the truth of her adoptive mother.  Heartbroken, but understanding that she could never return home, she stayed with the knights for several years, learning to ride and shoot until her skill nearly surpassed theirs.

            Kanaya meanwhile grew dark and melancholy, and had stayed in mourning dress since the day she left Jade in the woods.  She became known as the Black Countess, and without the calming influence of her daughter became far colder and harsher with the people.  They still loved her and suspected nothing, but it was a fearful affection.  People no longer disappeared in the night but were stricken by a plague that slowly drained them of life over several weeks, and Kanaya grew paler and harder in appearance, a marble statue of a queen rather than a beloved country patroness.

            Once, long ago, her husband the count had been paid tribute with a white orb, a fabled oracle stone.  He’d seen no need for it and kept it sequestered in a tower, but one day when the melancholy was exceptionally strong, Kanaya was struck with a sudden desire to see Jade.  It was the girl’s sixteenth birthday now, and surely she must have grown into a rare beauty, if she was still alive.  Kanaya strolled into the dark tower, shut the shutters, bolted the door, and asked to see her.

            The room filled with green light and the surface of the sphere shone like a mirror, before changing, seeming to become a flat circle and displaying an image of swirling colors that began to move and coalesced into a shape.  It was Jade, riding a white horse, accompanied by seven Knights.  “What is she doing?” Kanaya muttered to herself.

            “You have engineered your own downfall,” came a whisper.  Sly and insinuating like a serpent, the sound slunk along like oiled silk, emanating from the sphere.  “Jade’s Knights will destroy you for what you have done to her.”

            Kanaya felt a pang in her dead, shriveled heart.  “The bastards turned her against me,” she muttered.

            “Yes,” answered the sphere.  “While she breathes, you cannot survive.”

            Kanaya bit down hard on her lip, sharp fangs piercing the black flesh.  She hadn’t fed in days, so it did not bleed.  Sure, she loved Jade, but to her kind existence was the entire point of…existence.  Having already died once so long ago, she had no desire to go back.  If she’d still had normal reflexes she would have probably been trembling uncontrollably.  As it was, she merely clenched her fists until her gloves tore.  Could she kill her daughter to save herself?

            No.  She unclenched her fists.  But Jade didn’t need to die.  She just had to stop breathing.

            Midnight.  The witching hour.  Kanaya had been a witch once, or at least that’s what they’d hanged her for.  She barely remembered being alive, and her early days as a vampire were blurs of animalistic rage, hiding from the sun, and sudden binges of counting bordering on the fetishistic.  Still, whether by witchcraft or that old folk magic that everyone could do, she began to work.  Taking the most beautiful apple she could find, she performed a profane ritual by moonlight.  She had drained someone dry in a single sitting for the first time in years, because she would need a great deal of power.  When she was done, silvery blue moonlight clung to the fruit.  Had she still been alive, she would have fallen onto it ravenously and devoured it whole, seeds and all.  As it was, Kanaya wished for the first time in years that she could still stomach the taste of fruit.

 

            Jade had fallen from her horse and twisted her ankle, so the other Knights left her at home.  “DON’T OPEN THE DOOR FOR STRANGERS,” warned the Crab Knight.

            “Got it,” she said, from her position on her bed.

            “I’M SERIOUS,” he warned, “EVEN IF THEY SEEM COMPLETELY HARMLESS.  ESPECIALLY THEN, EVEN.  ONCE I OPENED THE DOOR FOR AN OLD WOMAN AND SHE TURNED INTO A FUCKING WOLF.  ONCE SOMEONE TAPPED ON THE WINDOW IN THE MIDDLE OF A STORMY NIGHT DEMANDING TO BE LET IN AND THE LAUGHING ASSHOLE TOOK PITY ON HER AND ALL WE SAW WAS A CORPSE WITH ‘FORGET-ME-NOT’ CARVED INTO ITS CHEST NAILED TO A FUCKING TREE OUT THERE.  THIS FOREST IS FULL OF HORRORS AND WE ARE STUPID CHUMPS FOR LIVING IN IT SO _DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR_!”  He slammed shut the door. 

            Jade flipped him off through it.  He had told her that story every single day she’d been left alone here since the day she’d arrived and nothing had ever happened.  Obviously anything knocking on the door wouldn’t be quite natural, but there were always obvious tells for things that weren’t human.  She almost decided to open the door if someone came, just to spite him.

            The day wore on and Jade was intensely bored by the time the knock came on the door.  She readied her bow and limped over to the window.  It had been enchanted so she could look out, but no one could look in.  A bent old woman completely wrapped in black.  She dropped something on the steps and ran away, fast as possible.

            Well shit.  This wasn’t opening the door for strangers, this was probably a trap.  She decided to take care of it, whatever it may be, before the others arrived to find it on their doorstep.  Jade opened the door a crack and aimed her bow through it—

            And immediately dropped it at the sight of the gorgeous blue apple on the steps.  Without thinking and with animalistic fervor, she took a huge bite, and fell over instantly as if cut in two.

 

            When the other Knights found her, the Crab Knight smashed his head into the wall.  “I _FUCKING TOLD HER_!”

            “What could have happened?” the Laughing Knight asked, cradling Jade’s head in his arms.  He’d loved her like a sister.

            “Yo,” said the Winged Knight, pinions raised in hostility, betraying his stoic demeanor.  He held the bitten apple, its magic depleted.

            The Red Knight rounded on the Rose Knight.  “Do something.  Magic her, or majjyck or something.” 

            She shook her head.  “I can’t heal.  I never could.”

            “She’s so cold,” said the Cat Knight.  “I don’t think there’s anything you could have done.”

            The Crab Knight drew his sickle.  “WE CAN AVENGE HER.  COME ON!”

            “What about the body?” asked the Laughing Knight, crying openly, but not sobbing.

            “I’ll help you prepare her,” said the Rose Knight, putting her hand on his shoulder.  The others mounted their horses, still tired from the day’s labor, and galloped off toward the castle.

           

            The Rose Knight summoned quartz from beneath the earth and made a coffin out of the crystal, enchanting it so Jade’s body would remain untouched by corruption.  The Laughing Knight set it in a clearing and stood vigil for seven days and seven nights.  On the dawn of the eighth day, a party approached. 

            A dozen attendants were escorting a man in deep purple clothing.  He was handsome and tall, wearing dark glasses with daringly sharp angles, and on his head was a small metal circlet.  “Good morning,” he said.

            The Knight bowed his head and said nothing.

            “What are you guarding there?” asked the man.

            “Take a look for yourself,” said the Knight.

            One of the attendants barked, “You should watch how you speak to Prince Dirk, boy!” but the Prince gave him a hard swat with his scepter and grinned at the Knight.  He dismounted and strode over to the glass coffin, and gasped.

            “I know this girl,” he said, placing his hand on the lid just above the head.  “We met when we were eleven.  She was my fiancée but then she disappeared into the woods….”

            “She lived with me and the other Knights for a few years,” said the Knight.  “But her evil step-mother poisoned her with an enchanted apple one week ago.  My brother and sister Knights have gone to avenge her.”

            Dirk nodded.  “I can tell you cared about her, but I have to ask.  Can I take her coffin?  I promise she’ll be laid to rest in the royal tomb, right next to where I’ll go someday.”

            The Laughing Knight smirked.  “Shut her up underground when she loved the sky so much?  But I guess it’s your right.  Just let me come with her.”

            The two of them lifted her up and loaded her onto the back of a wagon, and then the posse rode off in silence.  Eventually, the wagon hit a bump in the road and the coffin was overturned, spilling Jade out onto the ground.  “Shit,” the Knight barked, rushing to her side with the Prince close behind.  And then, suddenly and miraculously, Jade started coughing.  Color returned to her face and her body spasmed violently, and finally a lump of something silvery blue fell out of her mouth.  She sat up and looked around at all the strange faces.  “Um,” she said, finally noticing Prince Dirk, “Hi!  How’ve you been?”

 

            _“Wait,” said Feferi, “this is dumb!  The apple just falls out of her mouth?  That’s not poison, that’s…_ nothing _!_ Nothing _works that way!  And it’s so anti-climactic!”_

_Karkat smirked.  “And how would you end it?  True love’s kiss, but from a stranger?  I bet you wouldn’t even consider how creepy that is.  Almost as creepy as—” the bush rustled again, and Karkat fell silent._

_“I told you I never did this story!” Feferi shouted.  “I always thought it was creepy and weird!”_

_Gamzee laughed.  “Okay, I admit it.  Uncle Gam’s the one who made up the kiss.  Girl coughing out the bit of apple was just too random, so I lifted a the end out of ‘Sleepin’ Beau’—” the bush rustled again all the more fiercely and Gamzee wisely held his peace.  “Anyway, I guess this story’s just kinda problematic for this day and age.”_

_John chuckled.  “Yeah, I mean, how would you rather it end?” He gasped in surprise and held up his hand as if signaling to stop.  “Hold on a second, I’ve got it!”_

“She’s beautiful,” muttered Eridan, gazing longingly into the crystal.  He removed his circlet in awe and reverence.  “I wish I could have known her.”

            “She was wonderful,” the Knight agreed, losing himself in the memories.  While he was doing that, Eridan was lifting off the lid and sent it crashing to the ground.

            “Hey!” shouted the Knight, “What the fuck are you—?”  The Prince’s servants restrained him. 

            Eridan, weeping, crawled into the coffin.  “Bury me with her!  How do I live without you!?” he called.  “I want to know!  How do I breathe without—?”  Falling silent, he gazed intensely at the dead girl’s face, and reverently lowered his face to hers, placing a gentle, tender kiss on her lips. 

            Jade’s eyes fluttered open.  “What the fu—?”

            Eridan gave her another, much longer and sloppier kiss as she tried to shove him off.  “Help!  Knights!  There’s a pervert pedophile necrophiliac—”

           

_“Okay stop it,” said Feferi, laughing to the point of tears, “please, before this gets too dark!”_

_“You made your fucking point, now just finish it in a way that doesn’t make me want to scour myself with lime!” Karkat shouted, covering his ears._

_“Do you like my original ending better then?” asked John._

_There was a unanimous outcry of “YES!”_

 

            When the Knights stormed her castle, climbing her walls like men possessed, ignoring every wound and slaughtering every enemy, Kanaya retreated to the tower and spoke with the oracle once again.  “You tricked me,” she accused.

            “No,” said the oracle, “you misinterpreted what I said.”

            “It was a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she countered.  “If I had never come to you, she and I could both have been happy.”

            “You would never have been happy,” it whispered.  “Now return from whence you came, and leave me.  Your part in this is quite done.”  She hurled it from the tower window, and it was never seen again.

            There was a pounding at the door and something pierced through it.  Three arrowheads, perhaps?  No, a trident.

 

            They spent a season reacquainting themselves, Jade and the Prince.  They found that they perfectly complimented one another, both possessing a wry wit and intense love of life, and by the end of it decided to renew the old contract between their parents and were married.  The Laughing Knight gave her away at the ceremony, and Jade left behind the old castle for the bustling capital.  Her old home was left in the care of the Knights, who ruled fairly and justly.  Eventually she became queen, and had a daughter.  Her skin was white as snow and hair black as ebony, but her eyes were like bright chips of amber.  Against the advice of her friends and family, she named the girl after her second mother.

 

            _“That was fairly well done,” said Rose, when John had taken his bow and settled back on his log, “although the characterization was a bit flat and the narrative felt rushed at times—”_

_“WE.  TELL.  FAIRY.  TALES.” shouted Karkat.  “Go back to Denmark and read a novel if you want pacing and things making sense, Ms. Poet Laureate!”_

_“Well, I think we all know who won this round,” said Gamzee.  “John!”  John did a little dance and began pumping his fists wildly._

_“He didn’t tell a story,” said Karkat.  “He told half a story!  And the girls didn’t even get to go!”_

_Gamzee thought for a second.  “Okay, let’s start this shit over.  No more stealing peoples’ stories, John.  It’s wrong.”_

_John nodded emphatically while crossing his fingers behind his back._

_“I want to go next!” said Feferi, raising her hand and waving it frantically.  “I want to do Little Red Riding Hoo—”_

_The boys all promptly booed her.  “That’s so played out!” said John._

_“There’s like no way to make that original, you fail instantly,” said Karkat._

_“Why is everyone being mean to me?” Feferi muttered.  “I can so totally make it be interesting!”  She looked around wildly, as if seeking inspiration.  She glared at John, and then at something slightly above John.  She smiled, assuming a very poised expression, and began talking.  She was not reciting like Karkat or putting on a show like John, she was speaking as she would normally do, lending something of an air of realism.  It was as if she were gossiping to them about something she’d heard down at the salon, this strange story of a boy and a spider…._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So a two part story is the closest I can get to writing a short-story or a drabble a guess. How Homestuck Ends doesn’t count because it was a play, see?  
> The author was Pushkin. I didn’t want to involve another character in the frame-story just yet. I was a little disappointed how in the Russian version of this story they go to the trouble of making the dwarves into knights and then don’t have them do anything knightly.  
> They’re all going to be telling stories that appeared in their books, though John will occasionally steal one from another tradition like he did here, and Rose is going to tell at least one original story. The next chapter will probably be short, because Red Riding Hood is just much shorter, obviously. That is, unless, someone wants to suggest another story to begin in the next chapter? Oh, and Red Riding Hood was suggested by I Run With Sporks on FF.  
> One last thing, I chose the Knights by simply typing in Jade on the relationship thingy, and seeing what the most popular ships are. I'm a little distressed that John is like, number four. Shame on you all.


	3. Armed With Canon

_“So,” began Feferi, eyes bright with excitement, “once upon a time there lived a country boy and he was the cutest little thing.  His father and his grandmother doted on him and she made him a little red hood, and he wore it all the time.  One day, his father, who was the best baker in all the land…”_

 

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge

            “Son, Nana is very ill,” said John’s dad.  He shoved an enormous basket into his hands. “She’ll be fine but she can’t take care of herself for a few days.  Take her this food.”  John struggled under the weight of the basket.  “This weighs a ton,” he said, “What’s in here?”

            “Some cakes,” said his father.  “A loaf of banana bread.  A bottle of cider. Most of a ham.  A little grape juice, some fresh fruit, a pot of butter and a pot of honey.  It’s not nearly as bad as you think.”  He pointed out the door with his wooden spoon, which he wielded like a scepter.  “Go forth and become a man!”

            “By…carrying a picnic basket?” said John, shifting his weight.

            “When you can carry that basket without struggling, you are truly an adult,” he responded with authority.

            That’s what you say about everything,” John muttered as he stepped out the door.  He adjusted his bright crimson hood and walked down the little cobblestone path to the edge of their property and just as he was about to step through the gate, his father opened the front door and shouted, making John almost spill the weighty load of the basket.  “And stay on the path!  There are monsters in the forest!  People have gone missing recently!”

            “I know dad!” John shouted.  “I pay attention to my surroundings!  And I have _been_ to Nana’s house before in my life!”  And, shouldering the basket, he strode off down the road, grunting as he went.

            By the time he reached the edge of the forest, his shoulder was already hurting.  By the time the village was out of sight and the sounds of people going about their business had been replaced by the ambiance of the Wald, he was breathing hard.  When he reached the deepest part of the forest and the canopy closed overhead and blocked out the light, the crooked black limbs of the trees tangling together almost as if they’d been tied, John had to put down the basket and rest for a minute.

            He sat down on a rock at the edge of the path and looked out into the dark forest.  Only a few feet away, all traces of light disappeared and he was unable to see any further.  John reached into the basket and snuck a slice of banana bread; he despised cake but almost all other baked goods were fair game.  Nana wouldn’t mind, and it was a ridiculous amount of food anyway. 

            Munching away at the snack, he realized that there were vague traces of light further in, a myriad tiny sunbeams as thin as spider silk that seemed to crisscross with one another a hundred thousand times in some inscrutable pattern, like a cobweb of light.  The pattern was suddenly broken as something stepped out of the darkness towards him—

 

_“Wolf,” said John, yawning._

_“Wolf,” said Karkat, with an eye-roll._

_“Were-wolf?” asked Kankri hopefully._

_“That’s a tad overdone, too,” Rose noted._

_“IF IT’S A MOTHERFUCKIN’ WOLF I SWEAR TO GOD I MIGHT—”_

_“It’s not a glubbing wolf alright!?”  Shouted Feferi, having finally lost patience and jumped to her feet.  “Cry,” finished Gamzee, to himself, visibly relieved._

_“You guys are such assholes!” Feferi continued.  “We get like six versions of Snow White and nobody bats an eye—”_

_“Actually it was four,” Kankri interrupted, “and Karkat was quite recalcitrant—”_

_“I’m not glubbing finished fucktard!” Feferi roared, baring her incredibly sharp teeth.  Everyone stared in terror.  She breathed deeply and composed herself.  Eyes closed, she assumed a beatific smile and sat herself back down.  “No,” she said, “it wasn’t a wolf.  It was a girl.”_

 

            A slender girl with wild hair and shocking blue eyes stepped out of the darkness, stopping just short of the path.  John exhaled with relief, not even realizing that he’d been holding his breath.  He was certain he’d seen the girl around the village once or twice, so there was no worry.  “Hi!” he said.

            “Hello little boy,” she said, with a vicious grin.  “What are you doing out here allllllll alone?”

            “Just going to visit my Nana,” John explained.  “She’s sick.  She lives on the other side of the woods.  She owns the nut orchard.”  He produced another slice of banana bread.  “Want some?”

            The girl laughed under her breath.  “No thanks.  I don’t eat…bread.”  Reclining against a tree, she crossed her arms and said, “People aren’t normally as receptive as you are, kid.  Generally when they see me, they always twig to something being wrong.”

            John also laughed, but for different reasons.  “Why would they think that?  You seem pretty nice.  And you’re not a stranger.  Or, at least I’ve seen you around.”

            She twisted her lip in annoyance.  “You need to pay more attention to your surroundings kid.  This is actually pissing me off, how easy this is.”

            “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said John.

            The girl snapped her fingers.  “Tell you what.  How about I race you to your Nana’s house?  If you beat me, you get to live.  The slightest hint of a challenge makes it worth the risk.  I’ll give you an eight second headstart.”

            “That’s a pretty random number,” said John, standing back up and stretching.  He shouldered the basket again.  “Can’t you give me an even ten?”

            The girl looked at her nails.  “Eiiiiiiiight,” she said.  “Seeeeeeeeven.”

            “Also what’s that about getting to live?”

            “Siiiiiiiix.”

            John started running.  The girl stopped counting.  Then she fell over as if her strings had been cut. 

 

            Strands of spider silk floated gently down from the canopy onto her cold, lifeless face, her dead cobalt eyes reflecting the milky white predator hanging overhead.  The puppeteer spider is the deadliest creature in the forest.  She is simply the best there is.

            Skimming over the tree-branches with her long, dagger-tipped legs, she made her way straight through the forest, ignoring the meandering path.  She decided to ignore the boy for now.  Dear old Nana first, and then the boy would fall right into her grasp. 

            The spider’s skittering run brought her after a mere five minutes to a tiny house at the other edge of the forest, lying underneath a stand of oak trees with a walnut orchard nearby, just as he’d said.  It was a very cozy, grandmotherly house.  This Nana must either be very brave or particularly stupid, because the roof was made of thatch.

            Nana, lying in bed and dizzy with medication, did not hear the rustling sound of straw being shifted aside, and she likely would not have even if she were healthy.  Perhaps she would have seen the creeping shadow on the roof, the unnatural twisted shape like the devil’s own hand, but it was only there for a second.  And spiders breathe through their skin, so the only noise as the creature descended the back wall was the slightest whisper of a scratch from its legs like spears, and suddenly there was an awful pain in her shoulder and she knew no more.

 

            John arrived at the house, about to collapse from exhaustion, and knocked on the door.  “It’s open Johnny, come in!”  She called.  John went inside.

            “Dad sent some food.  Like, a lot of food.  All of the food in our house probably,” said John, setting down the basket in the corner.  He pulled back his hood.  “Hey, did a girl with crazy-eyes come by?”

            “I’m afraid not,” said Nana, from the bed.  John did a celebratory dance at having won, but stopped.  Light was streaming in from a high window, and it was so bright John couldn’t see her very well.  But she seemed smaller somehow.  And her voice was different.

            “Is there something wrong Nana?” he asked.  “Your voice sounds higher and younger.”

            “Well, I have been sick,” she said, gesturing with her arm.  The movement seemed jerky and wrong.  “My throat still hurts.”

            John started towards her, then stopped.  “Hey, do you want to eat?”

            “Not right now,” she said.  “I can go for weeks without.”

            “Huh?”

            “Hoo hoo!”

            John gave a polite half-smile, but the joke wasn’t that funny.  “How about I make you some tea?”

            “I just drank something,” she said.  “It was buttery and well aged.  I’m all full now.”  She reached out again and crooked her finger.  “Just come here and give Nana a hug why don’t you?  It’s been so long….”

            “I was here last week,” said John, approaching.  “And, is there something wrong with your arm?”

            “Oh, I’m just drowsy from the medicine boy,” she said a bit snappishly.  “Now will you hug me or not?”

            “Okay, jeez,” he said, stepping towards the bed.  It was only once it was far too late that he noticed the glazed look in her eyes, the ugly wound in her neck, and the hundreds of fine silvery strands connecting her to the ceiling.  She leapt forward and embraced him, and he was inextricably tangled in the threads, each stronger than steel.  The spider descended slowly, elegantly, like a dancer.  She could afford to take her time.

 

            _“And the moral of the story is that silly little boys shouldn’t talk to strangers,” said Feferi, a cruel smile on her black lips.  “Especially ones with sharp teeth.”_

_“Wait,” said Karkat, “that’s it?”_

_Feferi’s mouth twitched.  “Yeah?”_

_“He doesn’t get rescued by hunters?” asked Kankri, pulling out a notebook and scribbling._

_Feferi shook her head angrily.  “Don’t you two_ dare _try to finish my story!  It’s_ over _!  And I thought you guys were all about gruesome, violent, ugly stories!”_

_Karkat smirked.  “Shows what you know.  Our philosophy is kids can handle any amount of blood as long as it’s shed by the deserving.”_

_“But it’s a little known fact,” said Kankri, “that ours has the highest ratio of happy-endings of any fairy tale collection.”_

_“Little Red-Cap lives, bitch,” said Karkat, and he and his brother fist bumped._

_“The glub’s a redcap?!”_

Rotkäppchen

            Terezi smelled danger, both figuratively and literally.  It was weird.  The tree branches above had been broken and torn in pretty much a straight line for roughly a mile, and the bark carried deep but regular scratch marks.  There was a disturbing amount of spiderweb in the vicinity, and it tasted fresh.  There was no doubt about it; her prey was nearby.

            By the time she found the house, the sun was nearly setting.  Tracks in the rich cocoa-powder dirt nearby indicated that someone had come recently, and the scent of smoke meant that a fire had been lit today.  The nuts in the orchard were in season, but the ground was clear of windfall.  The presence of laundry drying in the back clinched it; the home was inhabited.  Or it had been.  There was a hole in the thatched roof that seemed to have been hastily repaired, as if whoever had made it had tried to simply brush the straw aside, not knowing that thatch doesn’t work that way.  There was also a glint of sugary silver amid the wheatey gold of the straw.  More webbing, binding it in place.

            Terezi noted that the front door was slightly ajar, and had also been stuck in place with more spun-sugar webbing.  That could be both a good thing and a bad thing.  Likely as not, the people inside were still alive.  The bad thing was that her prey was going to save them for her children.

            Without further ado, Terezi slit the webbing on the door, quickly and concisely, with her knife.  It was a good knife, made of milky-white chitin, sharpened on one end with natural serrated barbs on the other.  She kicked the door open.  The inside of the house was a tale of horror told in spun sugar, with the silvery-sweet threads coating damn near every surface, transforming the former home into a hollow sphere of webbing.  In the center of the ceiling was a huge wad of the substance, stuffed near to bursting with glistening, minty eggs, and hanging right next to it were two cocoons, one large and smelling of walnuts, baking powder, and age, the other small and topped with the most exquisitely, deliciously red hat imaginable.  Terezi licked her lips as she searched for the spider.

            She smelled the creature’s anger and heard her hissing in hatred from just above the opposite door, sealed tight behind the sugar-white webbing.  “You bitch!” she shouted in a stolen voice.  Terezi could feel her staring with her seven eyes—she remembered putting out the eighth—and felt the spider skittering towards her, gait uneven because of her shortened foreleg.  The webs were her undoing; just as spiders can feel their prey struggling in the trap, so too could Terezi.  She knew exactly what path her foe would take and from where she would strike. 

            So Terezi pulled out her dragoon-pistol and squeezed the trigger.  “Me, bitch.”  A gout of flame and molten birdshot tore through the air and incinerated the monster’s head, splattering the house with brilliant blue raspberry blood.  Terezi spent the next several hours cutting the family down, trying not to get too much webbing on her hands (tasty though it was) and wondering how much money she could make off the damaged exoskeleton of a puppeteer spider.

 

            _“Oh, I’d hoped someone would tell the sexy version,” said Rose, who had pulled out some yarn and started knitting.  “’Red Riding Hood’ has such a fascinating history and symbolism, and while much like ‘Snow White’ the variations between versions are quite small, it’s really the small things that make a difference.”_

_“What are you talking about symbolism for?” said Karkat._

_Sounding almost bored, Rose said, “Why, the redness of the hood could be an allegory for the sun, and the tale could then be a myth about its rising and falling and the changing of the seasons.  It helps that in a certain version the hood is golden and said to be made from sunlight, and actively protects its wearer by burning the wolf to death from the inside.  It could also in its redness indicate menstruation, by extension marking the tale as an allegory for growing up.  Being devoured and then rescued by the wolf could indicate a symbolic rebirth.”_

_Kankri cleared his throat.  “I would like to point out that my brother and I appended the happy ending to make the tale more child-appropriate.  We used Feferi’s version as a template and spliced on the ending from the “Seven Little Kids and the Wolf.’  Earlier versions of the story have the sad, traumatizing ending that Feferi so rudely tried to foist on us.”_

_“It’s about talking to strangers,” said Feferi helpfully._

_Rose, dumbstruck, dropped her needles and thread to the ground.  “So…all of my Freudian analysis—”_

_“Completely pointless,” Karkat sneered._

_A hideous black aura suddenly erupted from Rose’s body, a massive tentacled blackness writhing and flailing like the death-throes of an epileptic squid as her skin was stained an inky grey and the color leeched from her eyes until they were solid white.  A wave of invisible energy emanated from her, flattening the nearby grass and blowing the fire near horizontal.  Voice flat, hollow, and ringing like a funeral bell, she said, “_ **listen to my tale of woe** _.”_

Den Lille Havfrue

Meenah had often dreamed of the surface.  Her sisters were always going on about it, trying to make her jealous, and she pretended it didn’t affect her.  But it did.  She wanted to go up there and see how pathetic those humans really were.  Meenah was confident that if she only had legs, she’d be running the joint in a few years.

            Her mother was the only one who knew about her ambitions.  The great holy Empress of the mer-folk was as close to a divine being as they knew of in the depths, and she certainly looked the part, with her ethereal mass of black hair so long it could blot out the sun trailing behind like the limbs of a Kraken, her shimmering gossamer fins finer than the lace that drifted down on the currents and sharper than steel, and her glorious Tyrian scales burning like that mythical substance called ‘fire’.  She loved taunting Meenah under the guise of ‘helping’.

            “And of course their flowers are not like ours,” she said, plucking a terrified anemone from the coral garden and pricking it with her claw, “they release a substance called ‘scent’ which can only be sensed by your nose.”  Yeah right.  Noses weren’t good for anything and this bitch knew it.  She was just trying to fill Meenah’s head with nonsense so they’d be able to catch her easily once she was old enough to make the trip.  Pff.  As soon as her scales grew in, she’d be all the fuck up out of here and making trouble in the human world.  Meenah nodded politely and tugged at her thick braid; she wore her hair tied back at all times.  Her sisters loved to let that shit down just like the Empress and swirl around like the ethereally beautiful night-horrors that they were, but that shit always got in Meenah’s way while she was swimming.

            “So, humans though,” said Meenah, trying to steer the conversation somewhere interesting at least.  “How long they live?  Like if I take one as a pet how often I’ma have to replace it?”

            The Empress released a throaty chuckle.  “It really depends on what you mean by ‘living’ child.  They have these things called souls.  Some sort of organ or part of their body that is supposedly endless and eternal, existing long after their body is gone.  When they die, these are collected by monsters called ‘angels’ and hoarded in their palace in the sky, a world even higher than the surface.  You and I have no such things as that, thankfully, and when we perish, our blood becomes sea water, our bones coral, our eyes sea-glass, our hair the mighty kelp forests, and our scales precious pearls.”

            Meenah rolled her eyes.  “You’re wearing pearls.”  There was a fat string of light pink pearls that looped around her mother’s neck and waist at least thirty-eight times.

            “Your grandmother had a lovely complexion.”  The Empress surged forward and grabbed Meenah’s chin, forcing her upwards.  “You however, could use a little less _sun_.”  There were colored spots on Meenah’s face that would eventually grow into scales, when she was older.  They were developing sporadically and mostly on her cheeks and nose.  Humans would have called the effect ‘freckles’ she knew, but with her kind it was a sign of poor breeding.  She seethed at the Empress for pointing it out, but that was all she did.  Anyone else would have gotten a trident in the gut.

            Why should she wait?  There was no real reason.  What did it matter how many scales she had?  She was the strongest out of all her sisters, and would likely be Empress one day, if she could kill them all.  As much as her mother disdained Meenah, she barely spoke to her sisters at all; she was clearly favored for succession.  And once she was in charge, this stupid tradition would be over and every available siren would be singing their war-songs up the miserable human ‘streets’ and ‘boulevards’.  So she took her trident and gave it a kiss on the center point, and in the dead of a moonless night, swam up to the surface.

 

            The coral palace, with its pearl walls and soaring towers built from the wreckage of human vessels had always seemed so grand, but from up here, it was just a little multicolored pebble, and damn prickly looking to boot.  Would it kill her mother to invest in a few soft things, just to keep around the house?  Meenah’d nearly cut her hand open just crawling out her window and then the sharks would have gotten her.  Well, they would have tried, and she’d have had to explain all the dead hunting animals and she’d be found out and probably assassinated for being a troublemaker and it was just too much fuss. 

            Meenah turned her back on the glowing home of her youth and swam through the inky blackness.  Up, up, up.  Her night-vision could only make out little miniscule bits of flotsam, and she wondered if she should turn back.  Taking a quick look down, she confirmed that she no longer knew which way ‘back’ was, as she was right in the thick of the ocean. The only choice was up.

            The water became clearer, very, very slowly, turning slightly bluish.  There were more fish of the kind the hunters brought back from the near-surface, and even a magnificent whale.  She took time to gawk at its grandiose bulk, having only ever seen the crumbling bones of a dead titan, its eyes full of worms and skeleton thick with barnacles.  It acknowledged her with music, and she sang back.  Satisfied, it went on.  Meenah waited until the living mountain was out of view before continuing.  It was a long wait.

            Only minutes later, she broke the surface and felt the awkwardly uncomfortable sensation of her lungs filling up with air in the first time in her life as her gills shut down.  She coughed up seawater that had been resting inside her since the day she was born and for the first time felt how awful it was to be unable to breathe.  When her lungs had finally cleared, it felt like the water had been replaced with daggers and she hyperventilated as she became accustomed to these new, stunted muscles.  Was this a sign of her being too young, or did her family just punk her and never mention this part?

            Looking around (there was an awkward *snikt* as the nictating membrane over her eyes slid back, allowing her to see more clearly in the air; she hadn’t known it could do that) she found a rock and swam out to it, then lay down to rest a while.  It was the weirdest damn ten minutes of her life.

            Way up high it seemed there was another surface, a big awful black thing that would be impossible to ever reach, and an uncountable number of white glowy pinpricks.  Whisps of something that looked a bit like lace fabric fluttered and floated their way across it.  The _sky_.  She wondered if there really was anything up there, and what might be beyond that, and soon she became a little bit dizzy and stopped.  Occasionally some creatures she knew as birds would flit by, somehow swimming in this ungodly thin atmosphere.  Soon, her skin began to dry and she stared in fascination, examining it, touching herself, tasting the residue left behind by the water.  It was the most bullshit she had ever experienced.

            But soon, Meenah saw something that she knew made this trip worth her while.  _Fire_ in the distance.  She dove off the rock and swam as fast as she could, cutting across the water like a dagger, her trident held high in celebration.  Soon she arrived at the source of the conflagration.  “Hot damn!” she shouted in appreciation.  It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.  The ship had sprouted all of these dancing flames like psychotic angry flowers, all red and gold and orange and even hints of green and blue and pink thrown in for good measure.  The air filled with the scent of smoke, and Meenah marveled at the whole new world of information the useless meat-lump on her face was suddenly giving her.  The flames roared and laughed like an angry god, and the people onboard screamed and wept, adding to the cacophony.

            Meenah didn’t really have a choice.  For her race, it was instinctual.  She had to sing.  The chiming, shivering notes of her high, flutelike voice mixed in with the fire’s song, somehow completing the scene.  There was a horrific boom and even the water shook, and a spray of burning splinters shot out the other side.  The powder store had ignited and it was a miracle the ship and Meenah with it weren’t evaporated by the blast, though she didn’t know it.  The ship began to sink.  Someone stumbled out towards the railing, stumbling and nearly falling.  There was an ugly wound in the side of his head.  He eyed the water as if trying to determine which of the two cardinal elements provided a less painful death.

            Meenah was still singing.  He heard her and, hopeful grin on his face, dove into the water.  “Well that was weird,” she said, scratching her head.  She swam forward to investigate.  The human was flailing around like an injured seal.  “Hey.  Cut that shit out.  Do you want to get eaten by glubbing sharks?  Don’t you know how to swim?”

            “No!” he shouted, sounding terrified.

            Meenah gawked at him.  “The fuck’s wrong with you?!  Are you retarded!?”  She grabbed his arm.  “Let me drag you someplace dry, dumbass baby.  Not knowing how to swim and going into the glubbing ocean.  Jegus glub man,” she continued muttering in this manner for a long time.

            “Are you an angel?” he asked, sounding drowsy.

            The thought made Meenah’s skin crawl.  “Those awful demon things that kidnap peoples’ souls?  Hell nah!  I’m a siren.  Can’t you tell?”

            The boy shook his head.  “I can’t see anything.  It’s so dark and I don’t have my glasses and it’s never been used for cooking.  This is what the reference.”  With that string of nonsense he fell asleep.  Meenah was somewhat glad not to have to endure his babbling anymore.

            It didn’t last long.  “So if you’re a siren did you sink our ship?” he muttered.  From his tone of voice she thought he might have been joking, but it was so thin and quavering that she couldn’t tell.  “Sit up on some rock combing your hair, singing a song and luring our helmsmen into the liquor cabinet to have a smoke where he accidentally set all the stupidly high proof piss-water on fire?”  Meenah, not know how fire worked, didn’t get it.

            “Motherglubber, if I wanted to sink your ship I’d have done with ambushes and tridents and my fist in your pretty glubbing teeth.  Now hush up,” she snapped.

            The boy chuckled.  “Hey, thanks for trying to help me.”  He sounded extremely tired.

            “Whatever,” she muttered.

            “But it doesn’t matter,” he continued.  “I can feel myself, slipping away.”

            “Nah, I’ve got you pretty tight, it’s cool,” she said, oblivious.

            “Goodbye.  You…are a really nice singer.  My name was John, heir to the kingdom of Prospit.  Tell my dad what you did, and you’ll get a fair reward.”  He closed his eyes and leaned very heavily against her as if his strings had been cut, breath becoming shallow.

            It was like the sound of a plate breaking in Meenah’s head, the realization.  Firstly, she’d met a human prince.  Secondly, she let him die on her watch.  “Shit.”  She could survive a head wound like that, she knew, but humans were fragile things.

           

            It seemed to take forever, with the weight of the boy on Meenah’s shoulder and the anxiety over losing the first human she ever met, but eventually she found her rock again and threw him up onto it.  She crawled up beside him and checked his pulse.  He was still alive.  Excellent.

            The gift of her people was life.  So long as the cold seawater flowed through their veins, they were immortal and eternally beautiful.  There was a drowned sailor in the palace who did not die, because he had begged her mother’s help, and she fed him a little of her blood every day.  Now his lungs were filled with water and his body shrunken and weak from the pressure, his skin torn by her mother’s ‘affections’, but he still lived. 

            Meenah wasn’t going to keep this one.  But she might need him in the future.  “Alright suckah,” she said, biting down on her lip until the salty fluid oozed out.  “You’d best be glubbin’ grateful.”  And then she bent down and kissed him.  At least that’s how he would remember it later.

 

_“Rose stop it,” said John, strolling up through the surging mass of grimdarkness like it was just another Saturday evening for him.  “You’ve gone into the bloodfester throes or whatever and now we can’t understand the story.”_

_“_ **Ulyaoth Xel’lotath, Chattur’gha** _!” she roared, the hollowness of her voice like a steel drum.  She raised her knitting needles as John approached._

_Very gently, he took the needles away, threw them to the ground, and gave her a firm hug.  “You are not a gun.  You are what you choose to be.  Now choose.”  The errant bush rustled maniacally._

_“_ **Mantorok** _…” she muttered.  The aura faded away and her eyes and skin returned to normal.  “Did I go grimdark?  Again?”_

_“Afraid so,” said John.  He felt her slump against him._

_‘What did I do this time?”  She looked around over John’s shoulder at the terrified gathering._

_“You started telling ‘The Little Mermaid’, but it was all twisted and evil,” John said.  He pulled back and held her up by her shoulders.  “It was really good, actually, do you want to keep going?”_

_Rose sighed.  “If you insist.”  She sat back on her log and resumed her knitting.  Much more calmly than before, she went on.  The soothing quality of her voice lent a certain eeriness to the tale, like a lullaby heard over an old radio, drifting in and out of hearing and coherency, and you can swear the words were different once…._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that sea-creatures can smell, but Anderson was under the impression that they couldn’t and wrote the original story under that assumption, so I had to make a joke about it.  
> Lifted the ending of the Iron Giant and also Rose is just quoting the names of the gods in Eternal Darkness because she got distracted and went on a tangent about her favorite video games. Going grimdark isn’t as serious an event here as it is in canon. Happens damn near every other week, and John has to fly in from England to give her a good papping. The first time it happened she lost her house in Copenhagen (no one is sure whether she went grimdark because she lost it or lost it because she went grimdark) and she moved in with Kanaya in London (Kanaya being an analogue for Charles Dickens). What followed was an odd-couple type comedy sitcom which ended with Rose getting a new house and Kanaya relieved that the moocher was gone. This actually happened with the real life Dickens and Anderson.  
> It was originally going to be Feferi who was the little mermaid, but at the absolute last second I made it be Meenah because she has an actual relationship with John in canon (by which I mean that they have actually interacted and have a certain dynamic hush up I’m not stupid). And the prince is John because I don’t want Dirk type-cast into the role of prince, and I didn’t want it to be Eridan because I am morally opposed to Eridan/Feferi. Nothing where one party murdered the other in canon is acceptable shipping material to me. I’m sorry. I bet none of you saw this story coming except everyone who’s ever read a book. This story might take up most of the next chapter, after which I’ll do some suggestions people have made.


	4. Strangled by the Red String

            _“And so,” said Rose, “color returned to the prince’s face at the siren’s kiss.  His breathing became regular, and slowly but surely he returned from death’s door.  She kept vigil through most of the night, salty pink blood dribbling down her lips, but eventually the horizon lightened.  Tempted as she was to watch the sunrise, the siren knew she would be in grave danger if she stayed out another moment.  Fortunately, she noticed a tall ship approaching from the west.  Satisfied, she dove into the water with hardly a splash.”  Rose finished her knitting and handed the product to John.  It was a wooly red hat._

_“Fuckin’ sweet,” he said, pushing it down onto his head with an ecstatic grin on his face.  Feferi laughed at him._

_“But then what all up and happened?” Gamzee drawled._

_“She got caught I bet,” said Karkat.  “That’s how it always happens in fairy tales.  She broke a rule and now she has to face the consequences.”_

_“You’ll find it’s the lack of consequences that make this story,” said Rose.  “It does not merely bend but willfully breaks the genre’s rules.  Regardless…”_

 

            The Empress was waiting for Meenah in her room.  If her blood didn’t already run cold, it would have done so at the sight of her mother, voluminous hair filling the tiny space with swirling blackness.  “Hello dear,” she said, smile wicked and predatory.  Dear God but Meenah hated her mother.  “Did you have fun on the surface?”

            “Glub no, because I didn’t go to no surface,” she said, thinking quickly.  “I went out to the trench to see if a sperm whale would come down to fight the squids.  It didn’t.  I don’t think they actually live around here; Latula’s pulling my glubbin’ tail again.”

            Suddenly the Empress was behind her, clawed fingers gripping Meenah’s shoulders, pressing down on the bone.  She tried not to flinch.  Mother’s hair had surrounded her entirely, a swirling black cloud blotting out everything but her voice.  “You’ve still got salt on your cheeks dear.  And there’s the taste of black powder in your hair.  But even if you’d washed it all away, covered your tracks and removed all the evidence you could think of, I’d never mistake that _other_ flavor, the human boy on your lips.  How do you like the taste, darling?”

            “I have no glubbing clue,” Meenah said, very slowly and deliberately, “what you are talking about.”

            “Don’t be afraid of rules, little darling,” she said, pinching Meenah’s cheek, scoring it with the goddamn fishhooks she called nails, “You’re going to be making them someday.  Besides, _that_ rule was made to be broken.”  She leaned in and whispered, “How do you think I got my sailor?”  And with a _*whoosh*_ she was gone.

            Meenah rammed her trident into the wall and screamed into her pillow.

            She tried not to think of her excursion for a while after that, but it was difficult.  The Empress had shared the story with Meenah’s sisters.  They didn’t taunt her about it, but they didn’t have to.  She would see them gathered around in corners, and they would look up at her and giggle, sharp teeth flashing as they dispersed in a burst of bubbles and whipping hair before she could impale them.  It was awful.  What did it matter if she gave a human a bit of her life anyway?  Just because the Empress used it on her pet.  It didn’t mean anything.  Sure, her method of delivery was a bit intimate maybe, but it was the most efficient one.  And if she had enjoyed it a little, then that was her own business.  Her cheeks felt colder than usual.

 

            A year went by and Meenah was determined to return to the surface again.  The first trip had been so brief that she’d barely been able to enjoy it.  She still hadn’t grown any proper scales and she was pissed off at her late development, but the Empress had _practically_ given her permission to go up anyway, so who _actually_ gave a shit?  Meenah had acquired an atlas made of fine vellum, from an old shipwreck, and located Prospit on it.  Because it was the only place she knew of on the surface.  Of course.  The fact that it was the place John had come from had nothing to do with it. 

            She had a sudden chilling thought at she studied the map one day, that John might not have survived.  She’d just left him there on that rock like an idiot.  That ship might have turned, or not noticed him, or something asinine like that.  He’d certainly been in no condition to call out for help.  It had all been up to her and she’d done the job in the most half-assed way possible.

            With those thoughts swirling in her mind like mother’s hair, Meenah once again, in the dead of night, snuck away from the palace.  It looked even smaller this time than it had before when she left.  And she paid it even less mind than she had that first night.  Up and up and up she swam through the pure black of the underwater night, until she encountered a flash of blue-white in the dark, the glimmering crescent of a razor-sharp smile lit by phosphorescence.

           

_“Was it the Empress?” asked John, fiddling with his hat._

_“No,” said Rose, shaking her head, “it was her sister.”_

_“Who?” asked Karkat, raising an eyebrow.  “She had sisters?  I think you mentioned them but this is the first time they…do anything.”_

_Rose rolled her eyes.  “Just because they didn’t do anything in the opening paragraph doesn’t mean that they are completely without narrative value.  They cannot be replaced by_ talking bears _, unlike your simple dwarves.”  She went back to her storytelling voice and continued.  “This sister was the most middling, the most intelligent, and generally speaking, the most peaceful.  But tonight….”_

 

            Aranea was the only one of her sisters that Meenah could stand, and here she was waiting for her in the dark.  Her blue scales glowed softly in the dark, and she had a pair of dorsal fins as thin and sheer as gossamer that flowed out from her body like wings.  In a clawed hand, she held a sword made of knapped coral.

            “What are you doin’?” asked Meenah, hesitantly.

            “I’m sorry dear,” she said apologetically.  “I know what you and mother talked about last year.  She’s letting you go out and visit your young man despite being too young.  I know her well enough to guess that she made it sound like the rule wasn’t really enforced, but that’s simply not true.”  She raised the sword high above her head.  “It’s actually punishable by death to venture to the surface while underage.”

            Meenah tightened her grip on her trident, not quite grasping the situation.  “Are you gonna kill me over something I did a year ago?”

            Aranea laughed humorlessly.  “Meenah, I love you!  But what happened just makes it clear that you are favored for succession.”  She started trembling.  “If I can…beat you, I might have a chance to live.  I’m sorry.” 

            And with that slightest of warnings, she lunged, sword cutting a streak of bubbles in the black water.  Meenah acted on pure instinct, the killer grace she’d inherited from the Empress.  The regret that would follow her for the rest of her life was not in committing the deed, but in how much she must have looked like her mother while she did it.  Dodging the sword with laughable ease, Meenah slapped her sister across the face and grabbed her by the shoulder.  The stunned Aranea could only look on in horror as Meenah sank the trident into her chest. 

            It seemed to take Aranea forever to die.  The sharklike grin on Meenah’s face evaporated instantly.  After a seeming eternity, the pained look on her sister’s face dissolved, literally, melting into foam, and her coral bones drifted down to the seafloor far below.  Meenah was left holding a chip of pale blue glass, staring dumbfoundedly. 

            She didn’t know how long she floated there, holding her dear sister’s eye.  The water began to grey with the dawn, and a small hand placed itself on her shoulder.  Meenah had no idea who it could be, and she didn’t care.  “Where is she?” Meenah asked.  “Where did she go?”

            The voice that responded was young and bubbly and light and Meenah hated it instantly.  “She’s all around us, a part of everything in the ocean.  She’s embracing you even now.”

            “Does she forgive me?” asked Meenah, sounding dubious.

            The voice laughed.  “She can’t.  She can’t do much of anything anymore.  Your sister’s just another drop in the bucket.  Where do you think you are right now?  What do you think the ocean _is_?”

            Meenah felt her skin crawl.  Sea foam and salt water?  Coral and glass and kelp?  …but surely the ocean was there _before_ the sirens, right?  “Why the fuck did she do it?” she asked herself.  “We can all live forever, can’t we?  We don’t _have_ to die, so why do we kill each other?”

            “Not forever,” said the voice, “one day the same thing will happen to you.”  Meenah suddenly decided that she would like very much not to die.  “It’s the destiny of everything without a soul.”

            “Fuck that shit,” Meenah snapped, turning to look at whomever the Hell was touching her.  “How do I get one?”  The interloper was almost completely wrapped in drab brown and beige robes, but Meenah could see the face.  Aside from the pink scales and the glowing white eyes, it was entirely too much like her own.

            The stranger giggled.  “It’s very hard.  You’d need to find something that already has a soul, and you have to make it love you more than life itself.  Then you’ll be able to share the same one and go on together to wherever it is souls go when the body dies.  But that’s impossible.  Unless,” she struck a playful pose, “unless you already have such a creature in mind?”

            Meenah narrowed her eyes.  _John_ , she thought, but what she said was, “and just who the fuck are you, knowing so much about nothing?”

            “They’ve called me a lot of things,” said the stranger, drifting around Meenah in a circle, creating little streams of bubbles with her sharp fingertips.  “Melusine.  Loreley.  The sea-hag.  But my favorite name is the Witch of Life.”

            Meenah casually readied her trident, shifting her grip so it seemed very loose and careless, but could easily be adjusted to battle-ready.  In her other hand she held the smooth piece of glass, clenched so tightly that it snapped in two, ragged edge cutting a thin wound into her palm.  “What do I have to do?”

            The Witch giggled again and sweet merciful God but she needed a trident in the gut.  No, several of them, repeatedly, forever.  “Well, I can make you look human enough.  Your gills will shrivel up and your heart will beat red and hot, and your pretty little spots will turn a dull brown and your beautiful tail will shrivel up into a pair of hideous legs, just like a human’s!  But you’ll need to get the soul for yourself.” She raised a finger. "And before I forget, it'll only last you one year. But you can never be a siren again; if your time runs out, you die!"

            The Witch drifted closer—far too close in fact, and Meenah prepared to lung with her trident, but the Witch caught her wrist in a cold, inexorable grip.  “All it’ll take is a little bit of my blood,” she said, flashing her razor-sharp grin.  “Just like what you did for that boy.  But it won’t bring you relief.  No, it’ll feel like getting a hole drilled through your chest by a person you loved, so basically only a little worse than what you did to Aranea here—”

            Meenah took a swing at her, but the Witch just caught her other wrist and twisted it until Meenah was afraid it would snap.  She didn’t let it show on her face though.  “So,” said the Witch, “are you going to try for a human soul and human love?  Or are you going to live cold and alone and die by the hands of your daughters some lonely centuries from now?”

            Meenah gave the slightest twitch of a nod.  “Then I’ll just take your voice as payment!”

            “Huh?!” Meenah sputtered.

            “Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” said the Witch in a helpful tone, “You just sit tight and try not to die of agony.”  And the Witch bit down on her lip just as Meenah had so long ago, and pressed her bloody lips to Meenah’s, and the Witch’s salty pink blood slid down her gullet, leaving a mild burning sensation in Meenah’s throat that was completely and utterly overshadowed as soon as it hit her stomach.  Just as promised, there was a hideous pain in Meenah’s core, like being run through with spiteful malice by someone she’d cared about.  She tried to scream, but no sound came out, and then everything went black.

 

_“Okay,” said Karkat, standing up and raising his hands.  “I am calling a time out!  Ref!” he shouted, pointing at Gamzee, who looked vaguely startled for a second and then returned to his usual serene grace.  “Make it happen!”  Karkat ordered._

_“Sure motherfuckin’ thing y’all,” said Gamzee with a lazy wave.  “I think it was P. L. Travers who said ‘how much I would rather see wicked stepmothers boiled in oil than bear the protracted agony of the little mermaid’.”_

_Everyone looked at him as if he’d just started gibbering in tongues.  Actually, he did that often enough; they looked at him as if he had quoted a respectable source’s opinion on a relevant subject._

_“Well,” said Feferi, recovering first, “I think it’s really sweet.” With a bright smile, she added, “She’s just…afraid to die alone!”_

_John put his hand on her shoulder.  “Your time was way before this story right?”_

_Feferi nodded enthusiastically.  “I’ve never heard it before!  I wish it had been around so I could have put it in my book—”_

_“It only gets worse from here,” said John, with a sad, paternal look on his face.  “And it never gets better.”_

_Feferi’s smile wavered and she began to cry._

_Rose groaned.  “Oh very well, I’ll let someone tell another, shorter story in the meantime.  Something to soften the blow of my magnum opus.”_

_“Well we have just the thing,” said Kankri.  “It’s one of Karkat’s favorites actually, and once I edited it properly, it’s quite satisfactory.”_

_“Fuck off Bowdlerizer the Great and Terrible,” said Karkat.  “I’ll tell it, and I’ll tell it the right way!”_

_“Excuse me,” Kankri said snappishly, not quite enough for it to count as a proper snap, “I have yet to tell a single story.  I merely provided musical accompaniment for yours.”_

_“Well, we’re in the contest as a team, aren’t we?” said Karkat.  “It’s like, you know, ‘the Brothers Grimm’.  We’re a unit.  It’d be weird to compete against each other.”_

_“You guys, that’s adorable!” shouted Feferi, drying her eyes on her handkerchief.  “I wish I had a sibling like you.  Or like…the little mermaid!”  She started crying again.  Karkat slapped his forehead._

_“Okay, you guys are a team,” said Gamzee amiably, “but Kankri gets to tell the next two stories.”_

_“Fuck!” shouted Karkat, as Kankri assumed a self-satisfied expression, slightly different from his usual self-righteous one.  “You know what, whatever!” Karkat assumed a heroic pose, “I still get to tell my favorite story the way it’s meant to be told!  Get your asses ready for the greatest love story ever—”_

_“Cinderella!” said John enthusiastically._

_“Beauty and the Beast!” Shouted Gamzee, waving his arms spastically._

_“Tristan and Isolde,” said Rose, matter-of-factly._

_“Sleeping Beau—” Feferi clamped her mouth shut and covered it with both hands, looking around fearfully.  An exasperated groan came from the bush, followed by something that might have been ‘fuckin’ breakin’ my balls Fef,’ but was so heavily accented they couldn’t tell._

_Karkat made an expansive gesture and shouted, “YOU’RE ALL WRONG AND STUPID FOR THINKING IT COULD BE ANYTHING OTHER THAN—”_

 

Rapunzel

            Once upon a time, there was a poor peasant couple, a thresher and his wife.  They were blessed with a beautiful daughter, with bright pink eyes and glorious rose-gold hair, and they never questioned why this was despite both parents having black hair.  Regardless, the mother fell ill soon after birth.

            “Karkat!” moaned Terezi, voice laden with protracted agony.

            “Yes, my sweet,” he said, rushing to her aid, sickle still in hand.

            “I need something,” she said, gazing with unseeing eyes, “I think, if I don’t have it, I’ll die.”

            “Anything you want, anything at all!” he assured her.

            She put her hand on his chest.  “I need,” she dragged him in close and whispered, “I need some goddamn Rapunzel.”

            Karkat narrowed his eyes and nodded.  “THE FUCK’S A RAPUNZEL?”

 

_“Rapunzel is a salad green,” said Kankri, arms folded as if in meditation.  “It looks a little like spinach but has a characteristic nutty flavor.  For some reason many more recent versions have the wife calling for lettuce or cabbage, whereas older versions demand some savory herb such as parsley.  Regardless, ‘Rapunzel’ is more commonly known as cornsalad, lamb’s lettuce, mâche—”_

 

            There was an enormous vegetable garden with a high stone wall behind the thresher’s house.  After sifting through a goddamn botanical encyclopedia, he was able to determine that Rapunzel was in fact one of the many plants growing in it.  All he would have to do was take it.  This was easier said than done.  Though the wall was made of uncut stone, easily scalable, it was the property of a powerful witch.  In the dead of night, he took his sickle, kissed his daughter goodnight, then his wife goodbye, and slunk over the wall, praying he wouldn’t be caught.

            He was caught.

            The witch appeared in a flash of purple light, with hair like frost and terrible glowing eyes.  She held her wands under Karkat’s chin.  “Now,” she began, “tell me.  If you had caught _me_ stealing from _your_ garden, what would you do?”

            Karkat replied, “Let you off with a warning and tell you the fair price for that Rapunzel you snatched while we’re at it.”

            A smirk crossed the witch’s black lips.  “I’m not nearly so forgiving.  The fair price, you see, is your first born child.”

            “And if I refuse?” said Karkat bravely.  She told him.  “Well, fuck,” he said, and the child was given over to the witch’s care.  Out of a sense of cruel irony, she named the baby Rapunzel.

 

            The witch was not a terrible person, and vowed to keep the child safe, so she sequestered the baby in a high tower with no doors in the middle of a tangled forest of black thorns.  Safe as _fuck_.  Rapunzel grew into a beautiful young lady, though she was a fantastically bored one.  What’s more, she hated her name.  “Seriously,” she shouted, “it is a _salad green_!  Why would you name me after a side-dish?!” 

            The witch was standing in the forest below with an unamused expression, tapping her foot impatiently.  “To spite a man who stole from me once,” said the witch.  “Now are you going to let me up, or do you want to starve?”

            “What’s the magic word?” Rapunzel asked, shaking her fist.

            “It’s _absarka_ , but I assume you meant the password,” the witch deadpanned.  “Very well;” 

 

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair,

So that I may climb

The rose-gold stair.

 

            “Are you happy now?” asked the witch.  Rapunzel took her long golden braid and draped it across a little iron hook, letting it drop to the forest floor below.  It landed with an audible thump at the witch’s feet, and in no time at all, she had climbed up the rope of hair and was in the tower chamber.  She helped her adopted daughter pull her hair back up, and then shuttered the window.  The witch began to set out lunch, and asked, “Now honestly, what would you have named yourself?”

            “Roxy,” Rapunzel responded immediately.  “It sounds sleek and sexy, like it can break the speed limit.”

            “You don’t know what three of those things are,” her mother responded reasonably.  “Now, do you even like grapes anymore?  You never eat them, so I’ve been meaning to ask—”

            “No!  No, I love grapes,” said Rapunzel, er, Roxy, suddenly sporting a winning smile.  “I’ve just been saving them for a late night snack lately,” she said, hugging onto the witch’s arm with girlish affection.  

            She was of course doing no such thing.  In her tower, there were only a handful of things to do.  Roxy had completely broken the game of chess, reinvented it with far more complex and strategic rules, and broken it again, and now possessed the skill to make a grandmaster weep, should she ever meet one, and had done the same for checkers, Go, Pai Sho, and Risk (just capture Australia and shoot anything that moves), as well as several other games of her own invention.  On her ninth birthday she’d asked for a musket, and after proving unequivocally that her mother was entirely bulletproof, had taken to shooting songbirds out of the sky and was quite an accomplished sniper.  She’d set about improving her weapon by inventing the scope, the rifled barrel, and the breech-loader; all of which combined to make the game far too easy.  Roxy had taken up the violin and broken it as well, though in this case quite literally; she did not have a talent for music.  There were only a handful of books she was allowed to read, and she had read them all from cover to cover and written extensive commentaries that she had published in her own scholastic journal (her prouder mother/jailer had secretly handed these out to all the other witches, who were quite jealous; none of their captives were this applicated). 

            It was from one of these books, however, _the Odyssey_ , to be exact, that she’d gotten her next idea; wine-making.  Something told her that her mother, quite correctly, would have no truck with her doing anything of the sort.  All the same, her first batch had been quite palatable, and she hoped to improve the second even further.  “Do you think you could bring some white grapes next time though?” she asked, batting her eyelashes.   She wanted to make some canary.

 

            From his place in woods, Eridan saw everything, and he was quite intrigued.  The young prince had been stalking the witch for days now, trying to work up the courage to talk to her, but now that he’d glimpsed her possible daughter in the window, he realized that _she_ was his true love.  For real this time.  He waited until the witch had left and then sauntered up to the tower, shouting the rhyme in a very poor imitation of the witch’s voice.

            Fortunately, Roxy was now quite drunk on the last bit of Batch 1, and didn’t notice.  She was however, irritated.  “Jesus Christ lady, I thought I told you to call me Roxy!  What, you forget your broom you goddamn witch!?” she shouted as she let her hair down.  “Wait, it’s not here!  You must have left it somewhere else!  Fuck, I’m so _funny_!”

            Eridan practically ran up the wall, and Roxy threw down some abuse about how her mother had somehow forgotten how to climb, the old bitch, but in no time at all Eridan was inside.  “My dear lady,” he began, getting down on one knee, “ever since I saw your face it’s been as if the heavens themselves—”

            She socked him in the face, laying him out flat on the ground, and ran to the window.  “MOM!  _MOM_!  THERE’S A CRAZY RAPIST IN MY ROOM!  HELP!”

            Eridan scrambled back up to his knees.  “I promise that I would rather die than hurt you!”

            “That can be arranged,” Roxy said, reaching for the old rifle on the rack above her bed.  Eridan broke out into a cold sweat.  “Um, but first, as a last request, could you tell me about yourself?” he asked, thinking quickly.  “What’s it like being raised by a witch?”

            “It’s not as cool as you’d think,” Roxy spat.  “You’d think a witch would bother teaching her daughter magic and all kinds of cool stuff, but nooooo, it’s all, ‘stay in this tower, I need to protect you,’ and ‘I don’t want this kind of life for you, I want you to be a doctor!’  It’s bullshit is what it is!  I want to be a witch!  Is that so wrong!?”

            Eridan shook his head, trying not to cringe as the dangerous but attractive young lady swung her rifle around, sometimes mere inches from his face.  “In fact,” he added, “I’ve often dreamed of being a wizard, but my family keeps shouting at me about how magic isn’t real, and then constantly trying to keep anything occult away from me as if it were actually dangerous!”  He spat.  “But I’ve got a secret collection of wands and grimoires that they don’t know about.  As soon as I can figure out how to read that eldritch chicken scratch I’m moving out and starting a coven.”

            Roxy’s face lit up.  “You like magic too?”

            Eridan nodded enthusiastically.  “I have a real wizard’s hat!”

            “I’ve written, like, a five hundred page book about wizards!” Roxy said, grinning wildly.  “It’s not even finished yet!’

            “Can I read it?” asked Eridan, perking up.  ‘I have all kinds of ideas, but I don’t even know how to start!”

            Roxy dropped the rifle, reeled in her hair, and locked and bolted the shutters.  “You can read it in the morning big guy,” she said with a wink.

            “Huh?” said Eridan.  In response she picked him up and threw him onto the bed.  Then she kissed him hard.  She tasted of strawberries, wine, and barely restrained rage.  Just as he was getting into it, Roxy jerked up, a concerned look on her face.  “Wait,” she said, “you’re the first guy I’ve ever met.  This is crazy!”

            Eridan nodded reluctantly.  “It really would be the best thing to wait—”

            “I mean,” she said, ignoring him, “I don’t even know if you’re considered handsome or anything important like that!”  Roxy glared at him.  “Are you an uggo?”

            “Er,” said Eridan, “I’m an eight, I think.”  He was actually a seven, but he thought he was a solid ten, so in his mind he was being humble.

            “Yes!” shouted Roxy, pumping her fist.  She blew out the lantern.

 

_Everyone gawked at Karkat, staring awkwardly at the excited look on his face.  “So,” said Feferi, looking down at her hands, “so they just jump into bed?”_

_“Fuck yeah,” said the bush._

_“YES!” Karkat shouted excitedly.  He raised the index finger of his right hand.  “But it gets even better!  There are_ consequences _!  For you see, ‘Rapunzel’ is a MORALITY PLAY!”  Everyone damn near fell over._

_“No way,” said John, grinning as he sat back up.  “You don’t mean—”_

 

            “You are certainly gaining a lot of _weight_ , Rapunzel,” said the witch, glaring at Roxy.

            “It’s because,” Roxy snapped, “of the stress brought about by not being called my proper name!”

            “That is your proper name!” the witch roared.  There was alcohol on her breath.  “It is clearly my laxity in discipline that has led to this juncture,” she grabbed a fistful of Roxy’s plentiful hair and dragged her over to the window.  “I tried to keep you isolated from the evils of the world.  I promised to keep you safe.  But that wasn’t good enough for you was it?”

            “What are you talking about!?” Roxy asked, tears in her eyes.

            “No,” the witch went on, purple eyes glaring into pink, “you had to _invite it in_.  That’s what happened isn’t it?  Some passing huntsmen or woodcutter caught your eye and you let him up here, and he left you like _this_.”  The witch gave her stomach a sharp poke with her finger.  Something kicked back.

            Roxy paled.  “Holy shit.”

            “Yes, Rapunzel,” the witch said, sounding exasperated.  “You finally understand.  _Holy shit_.”   With a deft motion, she produced a pair of scissors and began to shear through Roxy’s pink-gold locks.  “This will be quite a detriment where you’re going dear,” she muttered as she worked.

            “What are you talking about?” Roxy snapped.

            “You wanted to see the world didn’t you?” the witch whispered.  “Well, once you’ve seen how it treats a pregnant teenager girl without a husband or a home, maybe you’ll realize all I’ve done for you.”

 

            Eridan rode up to the tower at dusk as he had done every week since he first met Roxy nearly a year ago.  There would have been a spring in his step if he were actually walking.  A few weeks into it she’d started just leaving her hair out for him to climb instead of possibly alerting anyone nearby to his presence.  He climbed up the rope, much more deftly than before now, and within seconds he was beholding the smiling face of his beloved—

            Or rather the scowling face of her mother.  She’d tied the end of Roxy’s braid to the hook, and was resting her face on her elbow, reposed against the window frame, looking somehow both bored and fuming with rage.  His beloved was nowhere to be seen.  They stared at each other for quite a while.  Finally, twisting her black mouth a bit, she said, “You’re not even that cute,” and sliced the knot with a pair of scissors.  He plummeted.

           

 _Everyone continued staring at Karkat.  Feferi broke the tension at last.  “That was_ awful _!” she shouted, and threw a rock at him.  Everyone else soon followed suit._

_“Philistines!” he shouted as another rock whizzed by his ear.  “This story is beautiful and you’re all fucktards!”  A colorful juggling club smacked him hard in the chest and nearly knocked him over._

_“It’s not even over yet,” Kankri said reasonably._

_Karkat snapped his fingers as he jumped back to his feet.  “That’s right!  This story had a happy ending!  That we didn’t make up!”_

 

            Eridan fell through the hideous brambles on his way down and their sharp thorns, long as nails, tore his skin to shreds, and gouged out his eyes—

_John’s popcorn hit Karkat full in the face.  He ignored it and continued, seething._

 

            Roxy did not go back to her mother.  As far as she was concerned the miserable old hag was nothing to her anymore.  Sure it had been hard, but living on the edge of the Wald, she discovered it was slightly easier to get by than not.  She found an old stone hut near the only road that ran through the forest.  Her useless accumulation of knowledge came in handy for once; one of the books she was allowed to read was an encyclopedia of medicinal plants.  She started a garden.  Locals came to her once in a while, for herbs and poultices.  They thought she was a witch.

            Regardless, that’s the only thing that saved her when the twins came.  Jesus Christ, if she never had another kid again it would be entirely too soon.  Still, they were adorable.  She named the boy after his father, and the girl was Beatrix. 

            Time passed.  They grew a little older.  Roxy feared every day that little Eridan would put his eye out playing with sticks, and considered shutting him up in some tower-like structure for a while.  Beatrix kept getting on her nerves, always questioning everything Roxy said or did and trying to get out of anything ever.  Dear god she loved the stupid brats.

            Eventually one day a blind beggar came to the hut asking for spare change.  His face was a mess of scars and he was bent double from some injury to his back, but she recognized him instantly.

            “Some coins, please,” said Eridan.  “Or a little food, anything at all—” Roxy grabbed him and kissed him and cried onto his face.  “You’re really more of a seven now,” she said, “But I’m good looking enough for the both of us.”

            “Rox?” he asked, hopefully.

            “Come on,” she said, dragging him inside, “meet your children.”

            “Huh?”

 

            _“And, with her knowledge of herbs and magic,” said Karkat, “Rapunzel was able to cure her beloved’s eyes.  They lived together with their children for the rest of their days.”  He waited for applause._

_“We don’t really give applause,” said John._

_“I know,” Karkat said with a smirk, “but I think this deserves one.”_

_“It was okay,” said Gamzee.  “I liked my version better.  The mom was more of a bitch so you felt justified hating her.”  Karkat rolled his eyes and muttered ‘Philistines’ again._

_“And the moral of the story is,” said Feferi smartly, “that you should always wait until marriage for sex.”  The bush booed._

_“But they ended up living happily anyways,” said John._

_“Oh,” said Feferi, thinking.  She poked her lip with a finger.  “Um.  Got it!  The moral of the story is you should save yourself for someone you truly love.”_

_“They had sex within minutes of meeting each other,” said Rose.  She appeared to be knitting a sweater now._

_“You should get to know each other before entering a committed rela—”_

_“There isn’t a moral,” said Karkat.  “It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened!  Now declare me winner!”_

_“No can do brother-man,” said Gamzee with an easy shake of his head, as if he regretted the action deeply but would be comforted by the general beauty of the world.  “This is still barely round one.”  Karkat swore._

_“Can we get back to my story, then?” asked Rose._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Polyfandrous on FF suggested I do Rapunzel. Oooh, fakeout episode, you are so angry. The epic conclusion to the little mermaid arc will be next update, promise. As to when that may be, well….  
> The actual Grimms version of Rapunzel is actually kind of haunting. That said, I knew that it would be hilarious if I chose the characters right. The situation is almost exactly the same, but the little differences are what make a proper fusion.  
> Okay, I’m a total geek about my amateur folklorist hobby. I have two annotated, beautifully illustrated scholarly volumes of fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen and Brothers Grimm. The Grimm one has only a small fraction of their stories, but is still the longer volume by far. But we’re talking Andersen. The editor of the collection really, really seems to dislike the Disney version of ‘The Little Mermaid’. A lot. It’s kind of hilarious. Chill out Maria Tatar. Just consider Uncle Walt another storyteller, like I do. The Animated Canon is just another collection. More thoughts on that story and its adaptations though, in the next chapter. Later loves.


	5. Unrequited as Fuck

_Rose stoked the fire with a stick as she began to recount her tale for the final time.  The thing she’d been working on was folded up carefully on a rock next to her seat; the story-tellers saw that it was not a sweater but some sort of enclosed, baggy thing.  “She awoke washed up on the beach, crusted with salt, seaweed tangled in her braids, an awful sensation in her lower body.  But it hardly mattered because when she opened her eyes, the prince’s blue orbs were shining down at her.”_

 

            Meenah was startled to say the least, but just sat there for a moment, and noticed how John’s eyes lit up when he saw that she was awake.  Then she realized she was stark naked, and socked him in the nose.  He fell backward into the sand, spewing bright crimson blood everywhere and she ran behind a convenient rock, feeling her face become uncomfortably hot.  Wonderful; first she had to get used to the surface, now she needed to memorize a whole new list of strange biological functions.

            She looked down at herself.  Yup, those were legs and feet alright.  And they hurt like _motherfuckers_.  Being freshly created and all, Meenah’s new limbs had no strength in them, and the skin was as delicate as tissue paper; the few steps she’d taken over the course sand had made her feet bleed, and her knees were already trembling under her own weight.

            “I’m sorry,” announced the prince, voice muffled by blood.  “I shouldn’t have stared, but I can swear you looked familiar.  Jesus Christ, that’s probably what all perverts say when they’re caught staring, but it’s true!”  He stood up, pressing a handkerchief to his nose, and slipped off his coat.  “Here,” he said, holding it out in her direction, looking pointedly out to sea.  Meenah threw the coat on and did up the buttons.  It came down to her knees.  She noticed now that her ‘freckles’ had become a dull brown instead of the rich pink they’d once been, just as the witch had said.  Humans didn’t have scales did they?  Bluh, she’d never look grown-up now.

            John asked her several questions about who she was and where she was from, and she couldn’t answer any of them.  In fact she became increasingly irritated at this asshole’s inability to understand that she _could not speak_ , so she grabbed his shoulders and shook him, pointing to her throat and making a few high pitched squeaking noises to illustrate that she was not stupid or foreign but simply mute.  A thought occurred.  Meenah pantomimed writing on her palm.

            John nodded enthusiastically.  “There’s pen and paper at the palace, don’t worry!  More importantly there’s food and clothes for you, but after that we’ll get you some writing implements and you can tell me where you come from!  Then we’ll have you home in a jiffy.”  Meenah rolled her eyes.  Who talked like that?  And this was the guy she was going to marry?  She wished she hadn’t let that stupid witch talk her into this.

            It was too late for that though.  Since she couldn’t communicate with him yet, she decided to win him over by demonstrating her exemplariness.  Assuming a regal posture in imitation of her mother, she didn’t let the pain of walking on newly formed feet show on her face, and kept a little behind and to the side, so he could see her proud bearing but not her bloody footprints.

            He talked as they went.  “Yeah, the person you remind me of is someone who saved my life once,” John said.  “She was sort of rude, but I could tell she was really a good person, and she had a great singing voice!  She joked that she was a siren, I think.  She was definitely a strong swimmer, that’s for sure.  But I can’t remember her face at all; I hit my head and I’d lost my glasses anyway so even if I remembered her face it would just be some weird colorless blob,” he chuckled.  Meenah raised her eyebrow quizzically.

            “Anyway,” he said, “she pulled me out of the wreckage of my ship and tended to my wounds, and turned me over to some nuns.  I spent a few weeks recovering there, but she didn’t stick around.  They said she’d left on a boat.”  He sighed.  Meenah was confused for a second, and figured that he must have been rescued by that boat she’d seen and assumed she was with them.  Meenah supposed it made a bit more sense than friendly sirens.  “I really wanted to thank her.”  Coloring slightly, he leaned in conspiratorially.  “In fact, I…guess I have this fantasy that we’ll meet up again and…” he trailed off.  “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, whispering, “but they’re talking about marrying me off already, and I don’t think I’d want anyone else but her.”  Meenah grinned viciously.  The guy was already pining after her!  This would be the easiest job she’d ever had.

 

            Eventually they reached the palace and Meenah was given a fine dress that was incredibly uncomfortable, not just in general, but it chafed her newfound legs something fierce.  She especially hated how the colorful, puffy skirt seemed to be a mockery of her once beautiful tail, and decided then and there that she would not pretend to be a siren like the ladies up here were apparently fond of doing.  John noticed her deathglare of disapproval and, when the servants’ backs were turned, brought her some of his old clothes.  Soon Meenah was dressed quite comfortably in a serviceable shirt and pants.  Reinvigorated, she once again pantomimed writing.

            “In a minute,” he said, and called for a table to be brought in with food.  He decided he’d like to keep his discovery to himself for the time being, and wanted to be the first to know what she had to say.  Meenah was ravenous.  Her teeth were no longer the sparkling razorblades of a shark’s mouth, but they were still unnaturally sharp, and she tore into her meal with gusto, savoring the exotic land-meats.  She ended up eating hers and John’s portion both, as well as two more servings.  Not waiting for a pen, she scrawled her message on the tablecloth in gravy as she ate;

 

            “Yo prince dude, I’m the siren that saved you that night when the fires started eating your ship.  I know, I’m amazing.  So here’s the deal, I gave up my voice to turn human because I want in on this whole ‘immortal soul’ racket you guys are running.  You want to marry me already, so this is a pretty sweet deal I’m offering.  And you’re not bad looking yourself either guy, so don’t think I’m getting the short end of the stick.  This is probably the most mutually beneficial a relationship can be now I think about it.  So whaddaya think, is like Saturday good?  How long do these wedding things last anyways?  Is there anything special we gotta do first?  And how do humans _do it_?  I’m very interested in learning that.  I hear that the chick lays eggs and then the guy fertilizes them, like fish.  Doesn’t sound very fun.”

 

            John meanwhile was completely dumbfounded at the patterns she was leaving on the tablecloth.  They didn’t look like any letters he’d ever seen, more like interlocking chains of circles shot through with random straight lines, and with strange curves and angles that almost made them seem like clockwork.  It was actually really beautiful for all that it was being drawn in gravy with an index finger while the artist was looking away.  There was a method to her madness that looked more like writing than drawing, oddly enough.  “Is this…the language they write in where you come from?”  Meenah rolled her eyes and nodded slowly and deliberately, as if talking to an idiot.  John laughed, not quite sure what else to do.  He sighed and told her he’d never seen anything like it.  Meenah growled, though with her silenced throat it came off as more of a weak _*mew*_ and John laughed at her.  She threw a teacup at his head.

            Several hours later, they had poured over every book in the library, or rather John had while Meenah watched in annoyance, but he was unable to find anything about the strange circular language.  Meenah growled irritatedly.  She guessed it was back to square one; win him over with her excellence.

 

            Soon, the sight of Prince John and his nameless foundling, who dressed like a man and carried a sword, riding off into the hills together, became a staple of life around the castle.  Meenah was curious about her new world and hungered for exploration, and John was more than happy to oblige.  “I swear,” he said, “it’s like you’ve never seen trees before.”  The first time they’d gone into the forest, Meenah had tried, and failed, not to gawk.  There were trees underwater, she wanted to say, but they were soft ropy things, trailing up to the surface like dead sirens’ hair, and they were red and brown and yellow, not brilliant green.  Their rubbery stems were nothing like the stony black bark and needle sharp thorns on these land-trees.  She could almost swear they had faces, popping in and out of the edges of her vision.  The local humans had a word for this place.  A foreign word she couldn’t quite get right in her head.

            Meenah’s feet plagued her when they went hiking or God forbid climbing, but she would not be the first to show weakness.  Meenah was always first in every new endeavor, and had quickly regained her queenly mien; her new human body had come with human instincts, so it became merely an exercise in applying her knowledge.  They said she moved with unnatural grace, like some fabled creature.  When she heard them say it, she would bare her teeth in a frightening grin.  They didn’t use tridents in this country and she wouldn’t know how to ask for one anyway, so she took up the sword and mastered it.  She even took up learning the idiotic crabscratch alphabet they used on the surface, though in this task she was much less of a student, because it was so different from what she considered ‘writing’.  Only at the end of each busy day would Meenah allow herself to feel the pain of being human, the strange aches, the unnatural warmth of her body, the invisible daggers that stabbed at her hideous feet, and the yearning for the sea.

            Her mission, Meenah found, was to prove to John that she was far past worthy.  He should be trying to prove himself to her in fact, and it was just her great magnanimity (and his glowing stupidity) that made things seem the other way around.

 

            Eventually, the talks about John marrying became longer and more serious.  Meenah would listen attentively, and wonder how to insert herself into the conversation without being able to speak.  It was decided that John would go and visit a neighboring kingdom to meet their princess.  “Yeah, I’ll meet her,” he said later in private a mischievous grin on his face, “but that doesn’t mean anything.  Dad thinks that just because I’m going to go say ‘hi’ means we’re practically already engaged.  What century does he think it is?”  Meenah laughed, but no sound came out.

            John laid back in his chair.  “Besides, you already know there’s only one girl I’d marry.”

            Meenah nodded gravely and pointed to her chest.  It was John’s turn to laugh.  “Honestly, you’re a close runner-up if I never find her or find out she died or something.”  Meenah rolled her eyes at being considered second-best to herself.  “Hey, you’re coming with me right?”

            Meenah nodded with an expression that seemed to ask if John was stupid or something, because asking that is something only and idiot would do.  John chuckled under his breath.  “I love how expressive your eyes are!  I never knew you could call someone an idiot with just your pupil.”  Meenah nodded with a satisfied expression.  “Well pack your stuff,” said John, yawning.  “We’re going out to sea tomorrow morning.”

 

            Meenah loved being on a ship.  She knew she could never return to the proper sea, the deep gardens and trenches of her childhood (how odd to consider it her childhood when it was less than a year past) but gliding across it was the next best thing and in some ways better.  For a human, the equivalent to riding a boat would be piloting a cloud.  Meenah wondered if her sisters would be able to see her, as she leaned out over the railing to look at some breaching dolphins, racing along with the vessel.

            Or maybe her mother.

            She pulled back from the water.  What the hell was she doing?  Going sight-seeing was fine and dandy for a person that _didn’t_ have a year to live.  And now the key to Meenah’s salvation was on the way to meet another girl.  He’d called her a ‘runner-up’.  Was he being serious?  It seemed to Meenah that she’d spent quite enough time pitching herself.  It was time to make a sale.

            That night, she and John dined together in his cabin, as they often had.  During a lull in the conversation, the term being used very loosely of course, Meenah picked up a slice of paper and a lump of charcoal, trying to make her movements seem idle.  She was actually incredibly nervous and could feel her ugly human heartbeat in her _fingers_ , threatening to crush the charcoal and ruin the paper.  Idly, she realized that her year was almost over, and despite having known it intellectually for some time, she’d hardly thought about it at all.  The reason was quite clear, and Meenah had to admit it to herself now; she liked John.  No, she _more_ than liked him.  She…she’d rather not put herself on the spot though, not even in her own mind, so she turned the thought against John. 

            It took her about ten minutes, trying to work through the awkward ugly signs that humans communicated with.  Eventually, Meenah held up the piece of paper, an expression of disdainful indifference on her face belying the ache in her chest.  In her uneven, trying-too-hard-to-get-it-right hand, was written the question; “Do you love me?”

           

            _“Oh my God Rose I hate you!” Feferi shouted, knees drawn up to her chest._

 _“So do I but what’s_ your _reason?” asked Karkat._

_“”He’s going to say no!  I can just feel it!” said Feferi.  “He’s going to break her heart and she’ll melt into sea-water!”_

_Gamzee put his hand on her shoulder.  “Whatever ends up happening I can tell you it’s still one of the most beautiful endings in the history of the genre.”_

_“Jesus Christ, we’re all poet laureates and literary critics now aren’t we Gam?”  Karkat snapped.  “Hey, let’s have another break and let John tell a stor—”_

_“No,” said Rose, eyes glinting dangerously.  “We are going to finish this, and we will do so soon.”  Her face suddenly became softer, her eyes lighter, corners of her mouth lifting up into the trace of a smile.  “And I know you don’t hate me, Karkat.  Remember when we spent Christmas together?”  John raised his fist into the air and started going “WOOOOOOO! WOO-WOO-WOO!” while Kankri muttered “Winter Holidays.”_

_Karkat reddened.  “I remember you showing up in the middle of November, knocking down the fucking door and stinking of schnapps, asking me if I knew who you were!”_

_“And you slammed the door in face and said that if I didn’t know who I was, how the Hell should you know?” Rose said, nodding fondly.  Feferi shot him a glare and put a protective arm around Rose despite having been the one who needed comforting only seconds ago, and the fact that Rose didn’t look like she needed any at all.  “And I went and cried all the way back to the hotel, which I’d only paid one night for and couldn’t afford anything else and went back to Denmark the next day.  Then you told Kankri about it and you two did the research and read every single one of my stories.  And as soon as I arrived to home sweet miserable home in Copenhagen, where the people liked me even less than in all the little Germanys, you’d sent me a letter of apology and_ begged _me to come and spend the holidays with your family.”_

_“Thank you for saying holidays,” Kankri interrupted._

_“And then,” Karkat snapped, “you showed up a week early, drunk, and nearly got us all hanged for treason!”_

_Rose made a dismissive gesture and blew a raspberry.  “That policeman was infringing on my civil rights to be inebriated in public.  And besides, you were quite willing to forgive me after I gave you that sweater.”_

_It’s a blood sweater,” he snapped, “and I feel filthy wearing it.”  He hesitated, looking down at himself and rubbing the material.  “But it’s so warm….”_

_“Indeed,” said Rose, sounding vaguely satisfied.  “Regardless, what the prince said was far, far worse than simply_ no _.  Any uncouth fool can say that they don’t love a person who clearly loves_ them _.  It takes a master of emotional ineptitude to say something like…”_

“Of course I do!” said John.   He stood up and embraced Meenah tenderly, kissing her on the forehead.  She stiffened at first, then leaned into him, nuzzling his chest, face feeling as if it were being devoured by the fiery flowers that had devoured John’s ship so long ago.  “You’re like the sister I never had,” he said.

 

            _Feferi screamed in anguish.  “Kill the bastard!  I hate him!”  She shoved John off his log, who merely laughed uncontrollably rather than being hurt._

_“What’d I do?” he asked, getting back onto his seat._

_‘You are clearly the inspiration for this character,” Feferi sniffed.  “Everyone knows Rose drew from her real life experiences when she made these stories up.  Like how ‘The Ugly Duckling’ is supposed to be her.”_

_Rose blushed fiercely while Karkat laughed at her.  “Holy shit, and we’re the two swans that are nice to you at the end, aren’t we?!”  Even Kankri chuckled a little, hiding his mouth as if ashamed._

_“Fuck all of you!”  Rose snapped.  “I’m retconing those swans into being bastards!”  She cleared her throat embarrassedly as she regained composure.  “Regardless….”_

Meenah shoved John to the floor and stormed out of the cabin.  The deck was empty, the night sky alive with stars.  She climbed up to the stem of the ship, nearly stumbling and falling to her death.  It only barely registered that the churning water below would likely kill her if she fell into it.  She could swim like no one else, but her frail human body would be broken from the fall, and her warm little heart and limp muscles seize up and spasm in the icy cold, her stupid lungs full up with water like daggers, and she’d be dragged under the ship and crushed.  Meenah vaguely wondered which of all the things would kill her first as she sat at the end of the stem and gazed off into the distance, face cooled by the night wind.

            On the horizon, the water churned up and great black mass lit by deep pink luminescence rose from the depths.  No, it couldn’t be….

            The Empress, Meenah’s mother, with golden trident in one hand, beckoning imperiously with the other.  Meenah gave her the finger.  Better to die up here than go back with her.  The Empress hurled her trident, a symbolic gesture, but piercing nonetheless.  It sank heavily into the water, shooting up a spray of phosphorescence like a gout of silvery blood, and the Empress dove beneath the waves, flicking her shining tail, gossamer fins shimmering in the moonlight.

            Meenah worked through the night on writing up a full confession, explaining everything about who she was, what had happened, and, most difficult of all, how she felt.  But fate is cruel, and conspired to make her fall asleep only an hour before they arrived, her work unfinished.  John would have searched for her, but decided to let her be upset for a while.  It wouldn’t do to smother people.  He left the ship without her, and went to meet the princess.

            Vriska was a beautiful as they’d told him, though not in the way he’d expected.  She had a wild sort of beauty, her long hair flowing freely in the breeze, and she hardly looked like a princes at all.  She was dressed in a naval uniform, and apparently captained her own ship, serving the kingdom as a privateer.  As soon as she saw him, recognition lit up her blue eyes.  “You’re that guy!” she said, an excited grin on her face.  “I was wondering if you turned out okay.  So, you ended up being a prince, eh?”  John could barely hear her over the sensation of the ground falling away from beneath his feet.  He’d found her at last.

 

            The thing Meenah hated most about Vriska was that the bitch was essentially her.  Sure, she had a bit more style and panache, but in personality at least, they could have been sisters.  She might even have liked her if she didn’t hate her man-stealing so much.  “She’s even more amazing than I could have imagined,” said John.  “We’re going to be married in May.”  He told her this as if she hadn’t just poured her heart out to him the night before.  She wanted to give him the note she’d been working on, but it wouldn’t be any use.  The fictions in John’s head had become the truth.  He could see Vriska’s face in his mind’s eye superimposed over the memories of that night.  He loved her, in a way he would never love Meenah.  Meenah had always considered herself a thief, snatching baubles from her sisters, plundering sunken ships, stealing pearls from clams and shells from hermit crabs, but the princess was a robber far more gifted than she.

            As the ship set off, Meenah watched John and his lover part ways.  For the first time in a long time, she felt cold again.  It wasn’t as good a feeling as she remembered.  Her last night alive would come before they returned to his kingdom.  At least she could go back to the sea.

            On the stem of the ship again, waiting.  The metallic grey-blue of the pre-morning covered everything; the exact shade of her rival’s eyes.  Once more, a figure rises out of the water, far closer this time.  It’s not the Empress.  It’s the sea-witch, wearing a fine red velvet cloak this time. 

            Meenah would have asked if the bitch had come to gloat, if she’d had a voice.  As it stood she merely drew her sword and prepared to jump, deciding to take the witch with her.  “So dramatic,” said the figure in the water and Meenah was startled.  It wasn’t the witch’s saccharine-sweet tone, but the low, husky voice of her least favorite sister.  Damara.

            Oh, Meenah had choice words for Damara, and wished she could speak them.  Even a pen and paper would suffice.  She briefly considered simply cutting her palm and smearing them across the ship, but then Damara spoke again.  “Do you even know what you’ve been doing to your sisters?  They’re agonizing about your useless tail, moaning and groaning to Damara about their precious little tramp.  See, Damara took up apprenticeship under a certain sea-hag—”

            Meenah’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.  Damara didn’t smirk.  The little half-smiles she gave when she was satisfied were something else altogether, something black and insinuating and full of derision.  “The very same one.  She told me everything, and there’s more than one way to get out of the palace.  What do you want to live forever for?  Death is the nature of things, and these humans are the unnatural ones.  But, let it not be said that Damara is not compassionate.”  Meenah laughed, and the squeaking sound was the loudest it had ever been.

            “Yes, let’s laugh as you melt into foam,” said Damara, with her black little half-smile.  “We’ll see who laughs longest.”  She reached into her cloak and produced a shining white needle made of coral and threw it up to Meenah.  She caught it, eyeing the thing wearily.  “It’s magical, obviously.  Using it will turn you back into a siren; then you’ll be free to come back down here and make a nuisance of yourself as always.”

            Meenah could have kissed Damara right now, and probably not use it as an excuse to bite her face off.  But there was that black little half-smile again.  “The Witch of Life was cruel, to give you this task with that price.  But she serves Life, and I serve Death.  To use the needle, you must plunge it into your human’s heart and drink his unnatural hot blood, smearing it onto your body.  Then your legs will meld back into a siren’s tail and your blood will run cold and you can at last return to the home that despises you.”  Meenah threw her sword into the water, slicing Damara’s cheek.  “The Witch of Life is cruel,” she repeated, sinking into the water, “but Damara is more cruel than she.”

            Meenah stared at the needle dumbfounded.  She hardly noticed herself walking back over the stem, across the deck, and she was at the cabin door before she noticed she’d moved at all.  She became incredibly aware of the pain in her feet, just as fresh now as the day she’d become human.  But she wasn’t human, Meenah thought, looking over John’s body.  She didn’t have a soul.  She was supposed to share his, but he already promised it to another.  He muttered that one’s name in his sleep and Meenah raised the neelde high, screaming as loud as she could.

            He didn’t wake up, her voice was that small.  The room was turning red, but Meenah hadn’t done anything yet.  Ah, she thought.  It’s almost sunrise.  She only had a few minutes left.

            The needle clattered to the floor, untainted.  Meenah bent and kissed John on the mouth, holding it for as long as she dared, more softly than anything she’d ever done.  She didn’t want him to wake up and see.  Meenah climbed back up the stem, each step a struggle.  She could feel herself breaking apart.  She was colder than she’d ever been, and tasted salt.  Without looking back even once, she reached the end and dove into the cold embrace of the ocean.  The only thing that broke the surface was coral, foam, and glass.

 

_“But Meenah’s death was entirely unprecedented,” said Rose, her voice low.  She was picking soft moss from a rock and stuffing it into the odd bag she’d knitted.  “Alone of all sirens, she had died away from the water, and so she did not join the crushing throng of her ancestors in their ancient tomb.  She went into the breeze, and her essence was blown about and spread across the world.  The air is more abundant than the ocean, and far less crowded.  In the end, she did achieve a kind of immortality.”  She stitched up the bag and added a pair of pink glass buttons.  She presented her handicraft; it was a little black siren with thread for hair and button eyes.  Her expression was bemused._

_Rose tossed it to Feferi, who hugged it tight and started crying.  “That was nice!  I think I really_ do _hate you now!”  Gamzee patted her shoulder.  “Come on, let’s go look at my version of_ The Little Mermaid _.  I brought a projector.  You’ll love it.  It’s got a talking crab.”_

_Sobbing, Feferi said, “That sounds nice,” and Gamzee led her away while humming ‘Part of Your World’.  A few minutes later, a gentle clicking and a soft silver glow drifted in from the woods as a triumphant trumpet tune filled the air.  John cleared his throat.  “Okay, first of all, that was great Rose!”  She bowed her head in acknowledgement._

_“This story is a brilliant allegory for cultural incompetency,” said Kankri.  “Their inability to understand each other’s culture is what led to the tragic ending—”_

_“No, the dumb bitch’s inability to write is what caused the tragical ending,” Karkat snapped.  “And that ending bit with the wind was really tacked on.” He groaned.  “But all the same I’m a fucking hopeless romantic and there’s nothing like a fucking hopeless romance.  This is my favorite one of your stories after ‘The Nightingale’.”_

_“Oh, I’ll tell that one next!” Rose said enthusiastically, “In Alternia, the people are all Alternian, and the Empress is also Alternian—”_

_“Ahem,” said John, “it’s kind of my turn, if I’m counting right.  You and the Grimms have really been dominating this session so far.”_

_“I don’t think it matters right now,” said Karkat.  “We’ve got over an hour to kill until Gamzee and Feferi come back.”_

_“How about I tell a couple of stories?” asked John.  “I know some really short ones that won’t do for a competition.  Then when he gets back, I’ll tell a long one.”_

_Everyone nodded that this was fair._

_“Yes!”  John shouted triumphantly.  “Now I’ve got love gone wrong on the brain though,” he said, and thought for a moment.  He snapped his fingers.  “Got it!”_

Binnorie

            There were once two beautiful young ladies who were sisters, and they lived near the mill-dams of Binnorie.  Their names were Meulin and Nepeta, and they had everything in common.  They loved cats, and hunting in the dark woods near home, and were absolutely in love with the idea of romance.  They even shared a love in particular; a handsome knight named Karkat.  The sisters joked that they would share him, but he had eyes only for Meulin. 

            “Hey,” he said one day.  “You two are completely insufferable, but I guess I hate myself so much that I’d rather be miserable with you than without you.  So marry me or whatever.”  Crying out with joy, Meulin pounced on the knight and dragged him to the ground, nearly deafening him with her cries of ‘yes!’  On that day, Nepeta’s love for her sister blackened and hardened into the deepest hate.

            “Hey,” she said, a few days later, “let’s go into the woods and watch the river!  The salmon are spawning; we could go fishing!”  Meulin agreed, never suspecting.

            Deep in the dark of the Wald, the gentle mill-stream of Binnorie was a rushing white river.  Meulin climbed onto a rock and followed it with her eyes; it ran more or less straight all the way to the sea, and she could see the tall ships coming in at the harbor.  Distracted as she was, she didn’t notice Nepeta creeping up with a rock, and hardly felt it as her sister smashed her head in and threw her into the river.

            Nepeta was no murderer, but she hardly shed a tear.  Still, the work was shoddily done, and her sister drowned in the rapids rather than having a clean death under Nepeta’s rock.  Green eyes open and cold, filled with melancholy, she looked like a ghost as she drifted down the little mill-stream miles away, her dense black curls wrapped around her like a shroud.

            Kurloz, the famous clown, was passing through Binnorie that day, and when he saw the gorgeous corpse in the water, he fell in love with her instantly.  He dragged her out of the water, combed her hair and planted a soft kiss on her lips.  Kurloz sewed his mouth shut with a strand of her hair, vowing to never kiss another, and buried Meulin under a bridge, the headstone marked; “here lies the drowned beauty of Binnorie”.

            Spring passed and Karkat vowed never to love again.  Summer passed and he turned to Nepeta for comfort.  Autumn passed and he noticed how beautiful she was, and how much like her sister.  When winter had passed, they were married.

            The clown’s wanderings had led him far from Binnorie, and they, quite by chance, led him back again.  When spring had passed, he had given up clowning.  When summer had passed, he had pursued strange avenues and ventured where he should not.  When autumn had passed, he’d met a witch and learned her secrets. 

            When winter passed, he found himself digging up the grave of his beloved, finding only shimmering white bones lying on a bed of black hair, as thick and glossy as it was when he’d laid her to rest.  He un-sewed his lips and kissed the mouth of the grinning skull, and set to work.

            Carving, scraping, bending, binding, all the while singing under his breath, dark songs that weren’t meant for human lips, Kurloz worked through the night.  When he was finished, there was a beautiful harp before him, carved from his beloved’s bones and strung with her hair.  He hugged it to his chest and plucked the string.  It didn’t hum like a normal harp.  It sang.

 

            Kurloz came to Karkat’s castle, and met with the lord and his lady.  He bowed deep, and began to play.  Nepeta’s heart stopped with terror as her sister’s voice rang out across the hall:

_“There sits my sister who drownèd me_

_By the mill-dams of Binnorie.”_

 

            And the harp snapped and broke, and sang no more.

 

            _“The end,” said John._

_“You really are a motherfucker,” Karkat shouted.  “First you get mad at us for telling a fragment, and then you go and tell one yourself!”_

_John chuckled.  “It’s not a fragment, that’s how it ends!  It’s a cliff-hanger as old as Scotland.  It’s up to you to imagine what happened next!”_

_Rose threw a ball of yarn at him.  “Cliff-hangers are lazy,” she said.  “They’re an excuse not to finish.  Tell something worth listening to now.”_

_“Alright, jeez,” he muttered._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had not actually seen The Little Mermaid until a couple of years ago. The one thought I had all throughout was ‘why doesn’t she write it down?’ repeated over and over and over. I never had this thought with the book version, but Ariel is a bright kid, while the little mermaid in the original story’s defining personality trait is her innocence, so there’s no excuse. I brought it up and addressed it by having Meenah write in circular Gallifreyan, a language made up by the Doctor Who fandom that is insanely difficult to learn (at least I think so), figuring it stood to reason that someone who grew up writing *that* nonsense would have trouble with the phonetic alphabet. I think bringing it up at all weakens the story, but I needed to do it, on the inside.  
> Like the original decision to cast Meenah as the little mermaid, the decision to have Damara show up at the end instead of all the sisters together was a last minute on that I think was a pretty good one. The exact same thing happens as in the original story, but it goes from a misguided act of mercy to a sadistic choice worthy of the jigsaw killer.  
> Meenah’s death; the original version of this story has two canonical endings that have plagued critics and folklorists alike for nearly two centuries. The one is the little mermaid’s death. The other is her resurrection as a ‘daughter of the air’ who has to perform good deeds in order to gain an immortal soul, with the provision that she gets another day on her sentence whenever a child cries. What the fuck Hans Christian Andersen you crazy sadist? The original ending was beautiful and perfect, the second one is extortion. Both are canon. Instead of ignoring the second one, I compromised by elaborating on what happens when a siren dies in this story, and then wondering what happens when a siren dies outside the water as a compromise.  
> Incidentally, Andersen would make paper dolls at his readings and hand them out to people when he finished, which is why Rose keeps knitting things.  
> Binnorie: so little to say. It’s one of my favorite stories, and its inclusion here is a bit inappropriate since it’s so short I can’t develop the characters properly, but I wanted it done. So badly in fact, that I didn’t decide on a cast until I started writing. Oh hey, for some reason half the fanart of Gamzee and Kurloz depicts them as fucking gorgeous. I guess some people look at these guys and think ‘monster-clown’ and some people see ‘bishonen as FUCK’. Next up, John tells another short one, and then Rumpelstiltskin.


	6. Eldritch

_“For my next tale,” said John, waving his arms dramatically, “I will be whisking you away to a land of fanciful delight!  The world of elves and fairies!”  He was no longer speaking but declaiming, reciting, not quite singing, stepping into the role of a bard.  His voice switched from dizzying highs to shuddering lows and heaved and rolled like an ocean.  “We’ll dance among the fairy rings and across the barrow hills, eating the most delightful sweets ever imagined in leafy halls beneath a silvern moon!  Their flutelike voices shall ring in the air like crystal bells and compel all who hear them to dance and sing and join in the wildest most wonderful party!  The Fair Folk are truly wondrous, remnants of a bygone age when all the world was beautiful!”_

_Everyone stared at him like he was an idiot.  “Well am I right or not?” he asked, voice resuming its normal timbre, face going just a little red._

_Kankri opened his mouth; Karkat shut it.  “Yeahhhh?” he said tentatively._

_“WRONG!” John shouted.  “Listen very carefully,” he said, voice low and menacing. “Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvelous.  They cause marvels.  Elves are fantastic.  They create fantasies.  Elves are glamorous.  They project glamour.  Elves are enchanting.  They weave enchantment.  Elves are terrific.  They beget terror.”  He pulled something out of his pocket and threw it into the fire.  It flared and began burning eerie blue.  “Did you know, Rose, that the original meaning of ‘eldritch’ was ‘having to do with elves’? And Here’s a little bit of poetry for you:”_

_Up the airy mountain_   
_Down the rushy glen_   
_We dare not go a-hunting_   
_For fear of little men._

 

Tam Lin

            Jade’s brother was king of Prospit, and Dave’s father was a prince of Derse.  It was agreed upon that they should be married, and fortunately enough they took a liking to each other, and were pleased by the arrangement.  The young knight liked to take his lady out on horseback into the depths of the forest.  He didn’t like the forest itself, understand, in fact he hated how unclean it was and the complete overabundance of frogs, but Jade loved their deep booming voices, and the flittering of the little pink hummingbirds, and the huge, brilliant blue reptiles that watched from the treetops, grown so thickly together that the light streaming down was thin and green.  The forest was in an eternal twilight, and more jungle than anything.  No, Dave only came to the forest because it made Jade happy, and other than that would never have cared to tread here.

            “Dave, Dave!  Look at this!” said Jade, holding up a translucent white frog.  Dave did look at it.  Then he went back to examining his horse for ticks.  Jade snorted.  “If you’re soooo bored, go take a walk!” she said, setting the frog back down where she’d found it; on a low, mossy tree branch.  Two seconds later a fat pink tongue shot down from the canopy and a blue iguana snatched the frog away and skittered off into the shadows.  Jade sighed.  “Now I have to find another one.”  She started looking around.

            “I was serious about that Dave,” she said a few minutes later, blindly groping the moss of a much higher tree branch.  A hank of it tore off, revealing squishy black bark underneath.  “You can go do something else.  I’ve been exploring this place my whole life, I know how to take care of myself.  We’ll meet over by that hill with no trees later for lunch!”

            Dave looked around into the dark twisting paths of the woods.  “Are you sure?” he asked.  He’d heard stories.  This was no ordinary wood.  There were murderers and bandits about, and worse, puppeteer-spiders and vampires, ancient monsters of indescribable shapes, and witches of the worst kind (it is commonly known that there are two kinds of witches; repulsive old women in wicked league with old Scratch, and beautiful young women, in wickedness a league beyond him).

            “I mean it Dave,” she said with a raised eyebrow.  “Really, you should be worried about yourself.  Go explore a little bit, and don’t worry about me!”  Hands and bare feet stained green with the blood of the forest, flowers and twigs tangled in her hair, eyes gleaming with mischief, she looked like one of the Fair Folk in all their glory.  Surely she didn’t need any protection here.

            “Alright,” Dave nodded.  “I’ll see you at the hill.”  He took his horse’s reins and walked off into the woods.  In a few seconds they disappeared from sight altogether.

            Dave never showed up at the meeting place.

           

            _“Well I certainly didn’t see that coming,” said Rose, eyebrows raised in near-appreciation.  “I think we should admit to ourselves that when it comes to gender equality at least, John’s stories have the best ratio of female heroines who…actually do something.”  Her eyes widened suddenly as she was struck with inspiration and produced some more multicolored thread.  “He’s simply the best there is,” she muttered, reiterating._

_John chuckled under his breath, looking just a bit smug._

_That’s not true!” Karkat snapped, “we have Cinderella and, and, Furrypelts—”_

_“Allerleighraugh!” Kankri snapped._

_“Gesundheit,” said John helpfully, making the sign of the cross._

_“Who cares!?” Karkat said.  “The point is we have plenty of female protagonists who are much more creative and intelligent than their counterparts from Western Europe!  I mean sure, we marry them off at the end but that’s just a convention of the genre.  For thousands of years success was measured by how much you owned and who you were married to, and honestly that was only just starting to change when we were writing our book.”_

_“That’s all true,” Rose said distractedly as she furiously knit out a vague, spiraling shape with her needles and thread.  “But in John’s stories, this beneficial arrangement is almost always reached as a reward rather than a specific goal.  These girls are much stronger and more independent than even your versions, and we can agree that Feferi’s are the least so.”_

_“Side-note,” said John, “her version of Furry/Donkey/Cat/leighraugh was, I think, just a bit better than the Grimms’ one.”_

_“Motherfucker,” said Karkat, standing up.  “I trusted you!”_

_John put up his hands defensively.  “I just think that the main character is just a little bit more intelligent in her version than yours!  She…seduces the prince basically, and your girl just sort of accidentally falls into his lap!”  John leapt to his feet.  “Why are we even talking about this?!”  He produced some more…something from his pocket and threw it into the fire.  It blazed higher, burning acid green._

_He began to speak again, quickly at first, but slowly regaining his even pace and low tone from earlier.  This was not a story to tell fast.  “The young lady was forbidden to go into the forest again after the disappearance of her fiancé.  And honestly, she didn’t want to go back; not out of fear, but because it would hurt too much.  But one night, she could swear she heard the pounding of hooves outside her window.  She stood up and rushed over to the glass pane, looking out into the dark Wald, and thought she saw a flash of red, like her lover’s cape, disappearing into the trees.  Barely daring to hope, she snuck out of her brother’s castle…”_

            The seasons turned and the woods shed their leaves, carpeting the forest floor in all the colors of fire.  The moss receded, leaving in its wake the cold black wood of the countless ancient trees, groaning in a stiff wind.  There were hoof prints in the ground.  The thick loam was untouched; the hoof prints were burned into stones here and there and the acrid mineral stink of it was fresh.

            Turning a corner, Jade found herself face to face with…a rosebush, blooming its last.  Heaving a shuddering sigh, she sat down in front of it, feeling empty and hollow.  But the roses were the most beautiful red, the same color as her beloved’s cape, and their scent was intoxicating.  Smiling slightly, trying to distract herself, she plucked one, and breathed its scent in deeply.

            She felt a hand on her shoulder.  “Jade?”  A chill ran down her spine and she turned her head very slowly to look at her assailant, reaching for a knife she had hidden about her person.  It was Dave.  She screamed in delight, dropping the knife and tackling him to the ground.

            She showered his face with kisses and then smacked him hard in the mouth.  “Where the hell have you been!?” she asked, shaking him.  “Why did you leave!?”

            “I’ve been in Elfland,” he said.  “Their queen made me her knight.”

            Jade sat there stunned.  And then smacked him again.  “Asshole,” she muttered.  “Fine, don’t tell me….” She trailed off as something overhead shifted a tree branch and the moonlight streamed in, illuminating her lover’s face.  His red-gold hair had gone white, and his deadpan expression could not hide a heavy weight.  His sunglasses hid the dark bags under his eyes, which were now tinged with yellow.

            “When I went away that day,” he began, “I went to the hill to wait for you.  I got bored and took a walk and I went the wrong way around.  You know how it’s so perfectly round and trees won’t grow near it?  That’s cause it’s not a hill, it’s a barrow.  I fell asleep and they dragged me into their world underground.  It’s so beautiful,” he said, desperation gleaming in his eye.  “Wine flows in rivers and jewels grow on trees.  Here, they look strange and twisted, but in their own world the elves are beautiful.”  He paused for a moment.  “I ate the food.  You’re not supposed to do that, but I did.  I can’t even remember what it tastes like, but now I’m bound to that place.  And honestly, I wouldn’t have left, except for one thing.”

            “What?” Jade asked, afraid of the answer.

            “Every seven years,” he answered, growing quiet, “they have to pay a tithe to Scratch.  It’s going to be me.”

            “Oh no!” Jade shouted; sleeping animals all around shuddered awake and skittered confusedly.  “Is there anything I can do?”  He told her.

 

            On Halloween, Jade snuck from the castle and waited at a crossroads near a crumbling old well, its water still clean and clear.  One road ran parallel to the dark wood and the other ran through it.  The trees over the wooded path had once been lashed together with spider web, and the remaining scraps of silvery silk fluttered in the breeze, catching the moonlight like little ghosts dancing in the wind.  Far in the distance, the village church bells rang midnight.  Jade produced a flask of holy water and drew a circle all around her.

            As soon as she had finished, the Wild Hunt was upon her.  A hundred howling elves thundered from the forest on ghostly horses that didn’t leave tracks, clanging their weapons and singing and laughing.  They were pale and blurry, their movements erratic, and they flickered and flashed as if they were in the world but not of it, as if they could move in time like humans moved through space.

            First came the footmen, the pages and maids.  A ramhorned creature floated by, black hair streaming behind her like a river of night, eyes white as moonlight, and a bullhorned boy with an enormous lance blowing into a trumpet, and a creature with eyes flashing red and blue, and countless others.  Jade did nothing, and they paid her no mind.

            Next were the knights and retainers, some stalking along the ground on all fours, movements lithe and graceful like jungle cats, green eyes flashing, the rest riding on their ghostly horses, brandishing their crooked silver swords like sickles.  Jade curtsied as they passed by.  Some stared at her and one creature riding on a dragon issued a cackling laugh.  A red eyed apparition with a mouth full of fangs approached Jade, but could not break the circle, and moved on.

            Finally, up rode the elfin Queen’s retinue and it was a sight to behold, beautiful and terrible at once.  Her mightiest warriors surrounded her, and her skeletal bard with the horns of a goat played music on a harp of bone with a voice like singing.  The queen herself rode in a chariot with no wheels made of shell and coral, pulled by things that might have been seahorses, and might have been dragons.  They whinnied and snorted fire from their trumpet-like mouths as she passed by, golden trident in hand, black hair extending behind, wild and free like a living thing, going on and on for so long Jade wondered if it would ever end, and why it didn’t drag on the ground but instead writhed and flowed as if moving through water.  She was so distracted she almost didn’t see Dave riding just behind the Queen at her right side, in gleaming red armor, the only being there wielding a weapon of iron.

            Jade did what she’d been told to do.  She jumped up and tackled him to the ground, dragging him into her circle.  The Fair Folk screamed and hurled abuse at her, riding up and surrounding her on all sides, but the circle flared blue fire, and they could not pass.

            Dave writhed in pain, teeth bared in an ugly grimace.  His skin was greyer than before, his teeth sharper.  “Hold me tight,” he coughed, “and no matter what happens, don’t let go.”

            “Of course not,” she snorted, “why would I even consider—”

            The Queen laughed and snapped her fingers and Dave was transformed into a hideous white serpent as thick as Jade’s waist, eyes flashing red and green.  He hissed at her and snapped his jaw; his mouth had both teeth and needle-like fangs.  Jade scoffed at the biological impossibility and held him tight, scratching herself on the scales through her dress.

            The other elves joined in the snickering laughter, rising high and rolling without rhyme or reason like the cackling of hyenas, and Dave changed, again, and again, and again.  He became a bird and almost flew away but Jade squeezed his talons near to breaking; a pile of spiders, but she gathered them carefully into her lap; a monstrous crab that snipped at her with its claws, but she held them shut, and finally a sword burning white hot, too bright to look at.  Now, at last, with the heat scalding the skin from her palms, she let Dave go, dropping him in the well.

            A plume of steam shot up into the air, obscuring everything all around.  She could make out the hissing of the Fair Folk, their flickering shadows and glowing eyes, the flash of a weapon here and there and the clopping of their horses’ hooves, bursts of flame from the Queen’s steeds. These all receded one by one, until at last, only the Queen herself remained, a pair of gleaming fuchsia eyes glowing sinisterly in the dark, illuminating the steam all around like twinkling stars. 

            “Well, well, well, Dave,” she said, voice sounding miles away and at the same time like it was whispering right in Jade’s ear.  “If I’d known you had a young lady waiting to rescue you…I’d have gouged out your pretty red eyes and put in the seeds of trees.  I’d have carved out your heart of flesh and put in one of stone.  If I’d the wit, yesterday, that I have got today, I’d’ve paid old Scratch seven times over before she took you from me.”  The pink lights faded into nothingness in the mist.  “Think of the times we spent, as you lay old and dying.”

            Coughing and sputtering, Dave climbed from the well as the steam cleared, stark naked.  He’d been restored for the most part; only that his hair was still white as an old man’s.  Jade blushed and threw her green cloak over him.  “What she said at the end there,” Jade muttered, looking off into the dark forest.  “She…wasn’t really going to sacrifice you, was she?”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  Dave muttered.

            “Time moves faster over there, doesn’t it?”  Jade asked.  “You spent years in their world, while we mourned you for months.”

            Dave hesitated.  Then he nodded.

            “What went on between you two?” Jade asked.

            “I am never going to tell you,” Dave answered, voice hard.  He wrapped the cloak around himself tightly, and walked away into the night.

 

            “ _The knight was wasted by his time in Elfland,” said John.  “Mortal food tasted like ashes in his mouth and he longed to join the Wild Hunt yet again.  He’d spent years planning his escape, only find that he wanted nothing better than to be a slave in the dark queen’s halls.  The elves ignored him when he called and ran away, laughing, when he intruded on their sacred places.  He died in disgrace, alone and insane.”  John stoked the fire with a stick.  It flared green again, and returned to normal._

_“John,” said Karkat, rubbing his chin._

_“Yeah?” John asked._

_Karkat made a rude gesture.  “You know we don’t like sad endings around here, you fuck!”_

_“_ I _liked it,” said Rose, needles clicking an flashing. “I don’t think I’ve ever had such a perspective on the creatures.  You either get twinkling little fairies fluttering around like imbeciles or venerable, wise, Tolkienesque creatures with stars in their eyes.”_

_“Just suck his bulge already!” Karkat shouted._

_“You know I’m saving myself for you though,” she said with a wink, then redoubled her knitting.  This time her project was predominantly blue, though in actuality the color was an illusion created by multiple strands of many different colors woven together.  It seemed bigger than the other things she’d made.  “This is going to be special,” she muttered happily to herself._

_“How long has it been?” asked Kankri.  The story-tellers strained their ears and heard a nice[reggae sort of beat starting up](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgA2xo0HYrE).  They sighed._

_“Welp,” said John, clapping his hands and rubbing his palms together, “you guys are right, I shouldn’t be such a wet blanket.  Here’s another story that illustrates the godless evil of elves and fairies,_ but _with a happy ending!” threw in another handful of powder and the fire flared cheery purple._

Childe Dave to the Dark Tower Came

            “HOLY FuCKING SHIT.  DIDN’T YOuR MOTHER EVER TELL YOu. TO NOT GO AROuND A CHuRCH WIDERSHINS?”  The great wizard Caliborn shook his bald head and glared at Dirk in disgust.  “FuCKING KIDS THESE DAYS.”

            “Shut up old man,” said Dirk.  “Just tell me where the fuck Rose is and I’ll get out of your hair.”  There was just the slightest hint of derision in his voice as he said that.  The hulking wizard bared his acid-green teeth but said nothing.  “And how do you do that thing with your Us?  It’s interesting.  I’m gonna use it for my ventriloquism.”

            The wizard snorted.  “LIKE FuCK YOu ARE.  YOuR STuPID SISTER GOT HERSELF TAKEN TO ELFLAND.  LIKE A JACKASS WITH NO COMMON FuCKING SENSE.  SO LIKE A WOMAN.  AMIRIGHT?”

            “Go to _so much_ hell,” said Dirk, casually stepping out of the wizard’s tower.  “I’m gonna go rescue my sister now.”

            “THANK YOu,” he called after the young knight, “FOR THE PORN.”

 

            Dave waited for his brother and sister to return:

 

_But long he waited, and longer still,_   
_With muckle doubt and pain,_   
_And woe was his mother’s heart,_   
_For they came not back again._

 

            “Fuck it,” he said.  “Hey ma, I’ma go rescue those idiots.  Be back by lunch.  Wait, make it dinner, I’ll eat over there.”

            “God dammit Dave,” she slurred, stumbling drunkenly from her room.  “If your brother couldn’t do it what makes you think you can?  Dirk’s _tough_.  He eats guns and shits bullets.”

            “I don’t know what those are,” said Dave.  “This is medieval times.”

            She snorted.  “Whatevs.  Look, if you wanna throw your life away, then fine!”  She went to her room and Dave almost left, but she came back holding a bundle, teary eyed.  “It’s time for you to be a man now and earn your slurs!  Spurs I mean,” she said, unwrapping it.

            Inside was his father’s sword, silver and slender, single edge keen enough to slice a shadow, and a deck of cards.  He looked at them and immediately put them back, blushing.  “You need something to pay that pervy old wizard with,” said his mother, wiggling her eyebrows, face flushed with drink.  “I packed you a lunch too.  There’s apple juice and a sandwich.”  She kissed his forehead.  “Good luck you dumb Childe!”

 

            Caliborn’s tower was tall and dark, made of crumbling stone.  The outside was littered with broken clocks.  A storm was brewing, and the black forest off in the distance was shaking as if with fear, or anticipation.

            Dave went inside without knocking; his mother had warned him that the wizard lacked courtesy, so he should be the same.

            “HOLY SHIT YOu AGAIN.” Caliborn groaned from the back of the room.  His voice was emanating from a gigantic serpent coiled up in front of yet another clock.  The tower was full of them.  “CAN’T A DuDE.  JuST BE A SNAKE. IN HIS OWN FuCKING HOME?”

            “How do you do that with your Us?” asked Dave.  “Also gross,” he said, sticking his tongue out as the wizard resumed human form and took up his black staff, crackling with dark majjykks.  “Also we’ve never met before,” said Dave.

            “WHAT THE FuCK.  ARE YOu FuCKING RETARDED OR SOMETHING?  I’M THE GODDAMNED CALIBORN.  I TRAINED KING ARTHuR FOR FuCK’S SAKE.  MY LEGEND HAS SPREAD THROuGHOuT THE LAND.  IT’S uNIVERSALLY KNOWN THAT I’M A REAL HARD DuDE.  WHO AGES BACKWARDS.  SO.  IF YOu DON’T REMEMBER MEETING BEFORE.  THAT MEANS FROM MY PERSPECTIVE THAT WE’LL NEVER MEET AGAIN.  AND THAT’S THE BEST NEWS I’VE HAD ALL DAY.”  He spread his arms expansively, voluminous red sleeves flapping like bat’s wings.  “NOW GIVE ME PORN.  OR GET THE FuCK OuT.  FOR THE LAST TIME EVER.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note: Cliff-hanger? Cliff-hanger! Childe Roland is actually a really dark tale and one of my favorites, but I thought, “what if Caliborn was Merlin?” and so it became a comedy. Nyeh.
> 
> The actual Tam Lin (or Tamlane) is very minimalistic and based on an old ballad. In fact, so is Binnorie and Childe Roland. This is John’s balladic trilogy (OMG that’s a real word). Anyway, it has a happy ending, but I fucked with it to jive with the portrayal of elves we’re having here. If you haven’t guessed, this chapter makes it abundantly clear; it’s the same forest in every story.
> 
> AND THAT’S WHAT I THINK OF DAVE/JADE *points at crotch* (jk)
> 
> John’s hatred for elves is a reference to his hatred of clowns in canon. He quotes Terry Pratchett in his first speech, and the poem is “The Fairies”, by William Allingham.
> 
> Rose is making something special. Gamzee and Feferi are enjoying _The Little Mermaid_.
> 
> It’s been a long time lovelies. I missed you. *cries* In the next chapter, we wrap up this story and start a new one, as told by a surprise guest star! That’s right, the bush guy. Maybe. (no)


	7. The Mystery of the Bush Revealed!

_John coughed.  He had a weird little coughing fit that lasted quite a while.  “Fuck,” he wheezed, “I think I swallowed an ember or something.”_

_“Then stop chucking glowing shit into the fire you moron,” Karkat snarled._

_Wheezing, John nodded, and waited for the fire to go down.  “It feels like I’ve been talking forever, for like, over a year.  That might’ve hurt my voice,” he said._

_“You’ve told like fifty stories so far,” Karkat grumbled.  He couldn’t really complain sine he’d pushed for them as much as anyone._

_“Would you like to take a break, John?” Rose asked, snickering under her breath as the needles flashed.  Her multicolored thing was taking shape, but they could still not tell what._

_“Hell no!” John coughed.  “I’m gonna finish this if it kills me!” He coughed again, a horrible, hacking cough, and Kankri offered him a cough drop._

_“”honey lemon flavored,” the Grimm said._

_John took it.  “Thanks.”  Sticking the candy in his cheek, he added, “Of course, I think I’m gonna forfeit my turn after this.”  He scratched his chin.  “Where was I?”_

“HERE’S TWO PIECES OF ADVICE. SO YOuR DISGUSTING FAMILY DOESN’T BOTHER ME AGAIN,” said the wizard Caliborn, as he flipped through the deck of cards with scantily clad women printed on the faces.  “DON’T EAT OR DRINK ANYTHING.  NOT A DAMN THING.  IF YOu’RE OFFERED SOMETHING.  DON’T TAKE IT.  I SWEAR TO GOD.”

Dave nodded. “SECOND THING TO DO,” Caliborn continued, a huge grin splitting his skull-like face, “IS DECAPITATE ANY PERSON WHO SPEAKS TO YOu.”

Dave blinked behind his sunglasses but tried to maintain his cool.  The wizard scoffed.  “HA. HAHA.  DIDN’T EXPECT THAT ONE DID YOu?”

“Can’t say I did,” said Dave.  “Why would I do that?  That sounds like a really fucked up thing to do to a person.  How am I just gonna walk up into someone else’s country, have a chat about the weather, and then cut their heads off, right after saying goodbye?  I’m not that big of a dick.  The bigness of my dick notwithstanding.”

Caliborn cackled, and ogled the girl on the Ace of Spades for a while.  “IN THEIR OWN WORLD, FAIRIES ARE BEAuTIFuL BEYOND BELIEF. IF ONE SPEAKS TO YOu.  IT WILL PuT A GLAMOuR ON YOu.  AND YOu’LL NEVER GET FREE.  uNLESS YOu GIVE THEM A TASTE OF COLD MANLY STEEL.  RIGHT THROuGH THE NECKY PARTS.  THEN THEY’LL LET uP.”  He leaned his massive bulk against a great grandfather clock, and it splintered against his weight.  “AND YOu’LL HAVE TO TALK TO _SOMEONE_.  BECAuSE YOuR SISTER IS HIDDEN FROM MY SIGHT.  WHICH MEANS SHE’S IN THE DARK TOWER. AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE IN ALL OF ELFLAND IT IS.”

“Makes as much sense as anything,” Dave said, barely hiding his disgust.  The wizard was clearly insane, but Dave didn’t trust the fair folk, and an excuse to stab one before it stabbed him would be just dandy.  He turned on his heel, red cape swishing behind him.  “Smell you later.  Unfortunately.”  The wizard growled as Dave stepped out of the tower’s threshold.

 

_John’s voice was low and melancholy, so as not to irritate his throat.  It leant something to the story though.  “And so Dave journeyed to Elfland.  No one knows what secret paths lie between that world and this.  They’ve passed out of memory, and in all likelihood have been sealed off.  The fair folk have grown tired of mortals, and now they sleep and dream of more interesting things than us.”_

The trees were tall, taller than castles, and their bark was silvery blue.  Blossoms, buds, and fruit stood out among the tiny pink leaves.  Dave couldn’t help but stare as he walked along, leaving deep footprints in the soft, green loam below.  A fruit fell from way up high and landed in his path, splitting open and leaking golden nectar that smelled like the sun.  He stepped around it, and thought about all the wormy apples he’d bitten into in his life.

After a while, the trees began to be replaces with crystal spikes, just as tall, which split into a dozen different branches at the top.  A fairy flittered by, as big as a human and dressed all in red like he, with red wings and long black hair that curled and rippled as she drifted.  She had the heavy curling horns of a ram, and cloven hooves.  Smile big and bright, she dropped a glowing seed into a little hollow in the loam and watered it with a red can.  With a rushing, crunching sound, it sprouted into another crystal tree.

“Eh yo, fairy girl,” Dave called.  “Can you tell me where the Dark Tower is?”

The girl drifted over, her big smile growing only bigger.  She had very pretty lips, but perhaps too many teeth.  “It’s right over that-a-way!” she declared, pointing with both fingers to the north.  A big, flattish hill, more like a mound or a barrow, loomed just above the blue and pink forest.  There were some monoliths of red stone in a ring around the top.

Dave squinted over the edge of his sunglasses, the green of the hill a stark reflection in his blood red eyes.  “Past the hill?”

The fairy giggled.  The sound was effervescent and pretty, like a spray of silver bubbles.  “No!  Under it.”

“Fine.  Elfland rules.  Towers extend underground instead of above it.  Why the fuck not?  Crystals grow like trees and hot babes talk to me.”  Dave bit his lip, realizing he’d spoken too much.

The giggle returned, a bit deeper this time, and more sultry.  He heard the slightest flittering of huge butterfly wings, the teensiest weight of a small, silver hand on his shoulder.  “Why do you want to go to the dark tower anyway?” said the fairy.  “Why not just stay here, with me?”

Dave was sure he could feel the glamour beginning to work, so he spun on his heel and drew his sword, ready to slice off the fairy’s head.

She leapt back at just the right moment, landing lightly on her hoof, and glared.  “What the hell guy!?” she shouted.  “I just wanted to chat for a bit longer!”

Dave sputtered for a second.  “You were using glamour.  I could feel it; it was getting glamourous all up in this bitch.  So much glamour that I thought I was in a Milanese fashion show for a second, that’s how much glamour there was!”  He was shouting now, starting to lose his cool, flapping his arms as he talked.  He forgot there was a sword in his hand and it slipped out, stabbing into the loam.

The fairy rolled her eyes.  “You talked to that lying wizard.  Just like the last one.”  She crossed her arms petulantly.

Dave looked down, embarrassed.  “I guess he was full of shit, wasn’t he?”  Then he slapped himself in the face.  “How do I know you’re not using it now?”  He was being far too understanding of the very pretty girl, far too willing to believe her, must be a sign of glamour.

She grabbed her horns and let out a frustrated groan.  “Human boys are so stupid!  If I wanted you glamoured, I would have you!”  She thrust out her finger like a spear, and like a spear, glamour tore straight though Dave’s center.  He fell to his knee, vision turning pink and purple at the edges.  Everything was a blurry mess except for the fairy, a glorious being of silver and red, hair like midnight and horns like the sun.  Dave was choking, his heart pounding.  His whole body felt hot, from the roots of his hair to the soles of his feet.  It was like an infection, like blood poisoning, like intoxication on a brew made of wormwood and toxic mushrooms.  He _loved_ her, he _wanted_ her.  It hurt so _badly_ how much he did.  He was sobbing, ugly gross sobs, his carefully crafted defenses crumbling to dust.

Then it was gone, and Dave wasted no time in wiping off his face, straightening his sunglasses, standing up, sheathing his sword, and wrapping the cape around himself like a blanket to hide his erection.  “Point taken,” he said.

The fairy grinned.  “My name’s Aradia.”

“Dave,” said Dave.  “I think I can trust you more than that wizard.  Wanna help me get my sister unkidnapped?”

Aradia nodded.  “If she’s in the Dark Tower, then that means the king has her, and I’ve had beef with the king for ages.  He’s not even from here!”  She folded her wings, collapsing them against her back like a moth, and set off at a skipping stride, light-hoofed and leaving no prints in the loam at all.  Dave followed with his heavy human tread.

 

Some time later, the green hill was reached.  Aradia took a silver whip from her robes, and lashed the side of the hill three times.  A slit of light appeared, and sliced the side of the hill like a knife, cutting out the shape of a door.  Behind it was a dark stair.  “Ladies first,” said Dave, looking down into a gloom.  Aradia stuck out her tongue at him and went through, and Dave followed.

He felt a sensation like spinning around his center, like falling up, and then he was righted.  He stood at the mouth of a big hole in the ground, and looking down through it, he could see the sky beneath him.  “What,” he asked flatly.

The fairy snickered.  “Turn around!”

Dave obeyed, and tried not to gasp.  They were in a huge cavern, and up above, on the ceiling, was a lake.  Right in front of him, however, was a big, black tower, crowned with parapets like horns, carved from a mighty stalactite, hanging upside-down over the lake, the gravity righted by majjycks beyond his ken.

Aradia gestured with both hands towards the big, moonstone doors, as if to mockingly repeat his earlier comment of “ladies first.”

“Fuck you,” he muttered, stalking to the door, his sword drawn.

She followed, lightly flapping her wings.  “I know you wanna,” Aradia said in a sing-songy voice.

 

The tower was big, and dim, but not dark.  There was light everywhere, and no shadows.  It was a kind of twilight, reflecting off the dark walls, paneled with sheets of transparent white stone.

As the pair ascended, the light became stronger, richer in color, though not necessarily brighter.  It was like a sunset, the richest colors coming out just as the sun is slipping below the horizon, blood oranges and bruise purples.

There were many strange rooms, but Aradia didn’t let Dave enter any of them.

He heard whispers, moans, and screams, all in turn, sometimes from the same room.  One room contained a horrid scratching sound paired with an ecstatic moan.  Both sharply ended with a harsh splatter.

“Be straight with me,” Dave whispered, not wanting to disturb the tower’s silence, “this is the king’s sex dungeon, innit?  That dude just now jacked off until he died, didn’t he?”

Aradia just laughed, but it was a sad, pained laugh.

 

They came at last to a great chamber near the top of the tower, where the walls were still rough and uncarved, though set and encrusted with gems, all reflecting the light of a huge lamp suspended from the ceiling.  It was an enormous black pearl, hollowed out and set with a carbuncle the size of a human head, its light pulsing like a heart.  And there, on a couch of silk and velvet, right in front of a set of heavy golden doors, was Rose.

Her skin was ashen, and her hair and eyes had gone stark white.  “God pity ye, you luckless fool,” she grumbled in a voice that was not her own.  The words did not ring like bells, but instead fell black and heavy to the floor, like fattened beetles.  “What have ye here to do?”  Rose stood up and strode over to the pair of adventurers.  Dave readied his sword and Aradia her whip.

Rose laid a hand on Dave’s cheek, and ran her thumb along his lips, before speaking again.

 

_Hear ye this, my youngest brother,_

_Why didn't ye bide at home?_

_Had you a hundred thousand lives_

_Ye couldn't spare a one._

_But sit ye down; but woe, O, woe,_

_That e’er ye were born,_

_For come the King of Elfland in,_

_Your fortune is forlorn._

And there came a horrid banging on the great golden doors.  Once, twice, thrice, and then they opened, and the king of Elfland strode in.

He was tall and handsome, his back straight, but his hair huge and wild, and a pair of goat’s horns stuck up from his head, encircled by a little golden crown.  His skin was dark, and he was tattooed all over with the stylized outline of a skeleton.  His lips had been sewn shut, and in his hands he held a mace topped with a steel fist.

Rose spoke again, grumbling as the king of Elfland stalked toward Dave and Aradia, declaiming like a Grecian oracle;

 

_Fee, fi, fo, fum,_

_I smell the blood of a bitch-ass human,_

_Alive or dead, with my silver hand,_

_I'll smack the brains up out his thinkpan._

 

“He’s controlling her, using her as his mouthpiece,” Aradia growled, baring her teeth at the king.

“Makes sense,” said Dave, “no way my sister’s rhymes would be so weak,” and with that, he cleared the distance between himself and the king.

The mace burned Dave’s skin wherever it touched, but he was too fast to ever take a serious blow.  The king avoided his sword as if it were a burning torch, as if just one touch would be unbearable.  But the king was fast too, and Dave couldn’t land a hit on him.  He writhed and twisted like a snake, always just out of his reach, rearing up and striking as soon as Dave was open.  Behind him, Rose kept up with the smack-talk with her black, borrowed voice.

“That last one was terrible!” Dave snarled over his shoulder.  And it’s true; her last rap was so bad it cannot be recorded.

The king took advantage and smacked Dave in the face with his iron club, and down he tumbled to the floor.

But the king of Elfland had forgotten Aradia.  She hadn’t taken part in the fray because her weapon was ill-suited to group battles.  But now, she slung back her whip and almost lazily flung it forward, catching the king around the neck and dragging him down.  Rose clutched at her neck and gagged, falling to her knees as she choked on nothing.  “The reign of Kurloz Makara is coming to an end,” she hissed.  “One way or another!”

Dave leapt to his feet, a smoking imprint of a fist on his left cheek, and stabbed the king of Elfland through the chest.  The wound burned with blue fire that radiated cold, and the king screamed with his own mouth, snapping the black thread that stitched his mouth.  A stream of purple smoke shot up into the air, splashing against the ceiling and dissipating into nothingness.

 

_“My throat’s too sore to think of a cool line,” John said through a fit of coughing that took everyone out of the moment, “but rest assured that it was super corny and really awesome.”_

_Everyone clambered to come up with one._

_“’That’s a bad case of heartburn’,” said Kankri._

_“’Speak up’,” said Rose._

_Karkat considered for a moment.  “’You may be smokin’, but I’m the one who’s hot.’”_

_“No wait! He turns to Aradia,” said John, “and says:_

“So it’s pretty much like that but in your pants and the sword is my dick.”  Aradia just giggled, and plucked the crown off Kurloz’s head, placing it on her own.

 

The enchantments on the prisoners were passed on to Aradia, the new queen.  She broke them and set the prisoner’s free, but kept the tower in its magicked state so they wouldn’t have to work against gravity climbing out.

Dave carried Rose, weakened from her long enchantment, as they searched the tower for Dirk.  When he was found, laid upon a slab like a corpse, Aradia rubbed his eyelids with an ointment and he woke up.  “Never thought I’d see an angel with horns,” he said immediately.  “Or maybe I’ve been lied to and Hell is the place to be.”

“Shut up,” said Dave, “you don’t even like girls.”

Dirk leapt to his feet.  “And I’m still a hundred times more slick than you.”

Dave rolled his eyes, though it was hard to see in the gloaming light, especially behind his sunglasses.

Aradia giggled.  “Oh Dave, you dumb jealous boy,” she said, then leaned in and gave him a big, loud smooch on the lips.

 

Aradia accompanied the three siblings to the edge of Elfland.  The doorway rippled in the air, like a stone thrown into a pond.  All around them were the familiar dark woods.  Dirk stepped through first, carrying a very grumpy and drowsy Rose. 

Dave lingered with Aradia for a few seconds. 

“Come back and see me sometime, handsome,” she said with a wink.

“You know it,” he said, with a small, secret smile.

 

_“The childe became a great knight in time,” said John.  “And his line lasted for a thousand years.  All his heirs were marked about the face with the imprint of the Elvenking’s fist, but all of them had fairy blood, and were protected from harm by the fairy queen, who loved them like a doting grandmother.  And his sister never walked widdershins around anything, ever again,” John wiped his hands as if patting off the dust of a hard labor.  “The end!”_

_“Too bad Feferi didn’t get to hear this one,” said Rose, knitting.  Her project looked a bit like a rainbow colored octopus now._

_“I heard the end!” Feferi declared, coming back into the clearing with Gamzee.  “It was really exciting!”_

_Gamzee had his projector tucked under his arm.  He tipped his hat at the group.  “That ran longer than what you thought it would,” he said.  “Let’s just count it as your turn.  Point goes to John!”_

_Karkat swore.  “What’s it matter?” he said after a moment.  “Who’s even keeping track?  I’ve completely forgotten what’s going on and who’s telling what.”_

_“Oh hey,” said Feferi as she sat back down at her place, tucking in her voluminous skirts.  “You know what story that reminded me of?  Not that they’re all that similar, just little touches like the princess in the tower, the evil fairies and all the plant imagery.  Sleepin—”_

_Rose reached over and slapped her hand onto Feferi’s mouth.  “Don’t say it!” she hissed.  “We don’t want that sopping wank-rag intruding on our festivities.”_

_The bush rustled and screamed in frustration.  “That’s it!” it declared, “I’vve fuckin’ had it, I’m comin’ in anyway!”  And out strode and young man covered in leaves.  He had a colored streak in his hair and curly mustache, and his clothes smacked of the Italian Renaissance, with their high collar and deep gaudy colors; purples and violets with creamy lace.  His coat was fastened with golden hooks and silver buttons, and he wore ridiculous puffy pantaloons.  “I’m fuck-motherin’ Eridan Basile, author of_ Il Pentamerone, _the first national collection of fairy tales, and I’m gonna tell you a story now!”_

_Karkat gagged.  “Get lost you raging misogynist!”_

_“Hey I love women!” said Eridan.  He then pointed an accusing finger at Kankri.  “He’s the misogynist!  I put my own fanciful spin on some stories, but he’s the one who went around turning step-mothers evil like it was going out of style.”  He huffed and stepped over to the brothers.  “Besides, you’re both huge fans, admit it.”_

_Karkat winced and nodded, and Kankri muttered something about Eridan’s problematic depictions of race and explicit baby-murder.  “Alright fine, Kankri’s a misogynist,” Rose interrupted, barely looking up from her knitting.  Kankri looked about to protest, but he stopped himself with a sigh.  “Why do so many of your stories end with women marrying their rapists though, Eridan?”_

_Everyone stared.  Eridan sighed.  “Alright I won’t tell ‘Sleeping Beauty’.”_

_A sigh of relief echoed through the Wald._

_“Anyway here’s ‘Patient Griselda’.”_

_Everyone groaned.  “You didn’t even write that one!” Karkat growled.  But it was too late, he’d already started, his manner as pompous and self-important as only the Italian Renaissance can be._

Patient Aradia

“You should get married,” said Nepeta.  Equius broke out into a cold sweat.  She was his most prized advisor and he’d always listened to her. 

But girls made him nervous.  “Why?”

“You need an heir, silly,” said Nepeta, rolling onto her back and playing with a ball of yarn.

“So I shouldn’t marry for love?” Equius mumbled.

Nepeta snickered.  “Did you have someone in mind?”

 

Aradia stepped out onto her porch, smiling a greeting up at the sun.  It was so warm and welcoming!  She may have been a mere peasant living in a tumbledown cottage, but life was good to her in other ways.

It would not be so for long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I return.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smSY6P7QBLk) I left this fic for a very long time and I honestly don’t know why, guess I just had a lot on my plate and let this thing in particular fall by the wayside.  
>  Dave/Aradia is a reasonably cute ship, if you imagine it as Dave just being (rightly) stunned by this divine being and not know what to do about her, as I have done here.   
> All three of John’s stories in this arc featured Kurloz progressing through the society of the fairy world. Though you can reasonably argue that all three Kurlozes are the same Kurloz, it’s also something of an impossibility since other character recur. Still, there’s a mystery to be unraveled here, if you’re willing to try.  
> I don’t have much to say about Giambattista Basile except for what was gone over in the fic. He wrote a book in the style of the Thousand and One Nights, with an elaborate frame story in which a princess has misadventures that lead to a ton of stories being told. Some of these are the oldest recorded versions of certain fairy tales, including the “original” ‘Sleeping Beauty’ where the prince rapes her in her sleep :/  
> I’d been alluding to that story the entire time with the storytellers not wanting to say the name of the fairy tale, because they didn’t want Eridan to pop out and tell his rapey version. And no, I was never going to actually tell it here, the original plan was to always fake you out with a version of ‘Patient Griselda’, which is just as dark but a bit more palatable; we’ll talk about that in the next note.  
> The Grimms really did like his book for a variety of reasons. I’ve not actually read any of his stories (patient Griselda is from the Decameron, which is an altogether different book by an earlier author, but again, that’s for the next note), though I’ll try to do some research should Eridan get another turn ([spoilers] he will). We’ll get a slightly better guest next round; can you say Scheherazade? (I can say it but not spell it).  
> Also, I am quite sick, hence John’s coughing joke.


End file.
